[Haskell-cafe] More problems [Tetris]

Peter Verswyvelen bf3 at telenet.be
Wed Nov 21 14:11:22 EST 2007


No GLUT is not bundled with GHC 6.8.1 anymore. Yes, that is weird.

It was bundled with GHC 6.6.1. But installing it for GHC 6.8.1 is really
easy, but you have to install msys/mingw first. 

So if you want to do some experiments with OpenGL without having to install
other stuff, use GHC 6.6.1.

*** Don't give up, it's lots of fun once it works ***

Yeah, Windows users are a bit second class citizens when it comes to
Haskell, but that's the way it works. Personally I can understand that.
Windows is really a mess. My first computer with a real OS was an Amiga, and
I must say that I miss that elegance and simplicity in *all* modern OSes.
For many people, Linux seems to have that elegance. Personally, I don't see
it, but I don't see that in Windows either... 


-----Original Message-----
From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
[mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Coppin
Sent: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 7:27 PM
To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
Subject: [Haskell-cafe] More problems [Tetris]

Andrew Coppin wrote:
> Jeremy Shaw wrote:
>> http://haskell-tetris.pbwiki.com/Main
>>   A minimal openGL haskell tetris clone:
>
> Neat! I shall have to give this a try...

Negatro. I can't get this to work. :-(

It seems that the [Haskell] GLUT package isn't installed. That's really 
weird - I'm *sure* it used to be bundled with GHC, and I can't see 
anything in any release notes to say it has been removed. And the online 
Haddoc documentation states that it's there. But my local copy says it 
isn't, and ghc-pkg says it isn't. OpenGL is instilled, but not GLUT.

Oh well, that's pretty weird, but it's OK, I'll just install GLUT from 
Hackage. ;-) But, alas, no. That doesn't work either. The reason? Well, 
apparently Cabal can't find "sh". This is probably related to the fact 
that "sh" doesn't exist on my computer. On further inspection, it seems 
that part of the installation routine is written as a bash script. Oh cool.

At this point, I gave up.

Not wanting to sound like somebody who just complains all day, but this 
kind of thing seems to be pretty typical of trying to get just about 
anything Haskell-related to work here. (I also elided the minor detail 
that I first had to work out how to extract files from a Tar/GZip file. 
It's common on Unix, but Windows doesn't know what to make of it. 
Fortunately, I happen to know the right 3rd party tools to fix this; I'm 
not sure if everyone else who might try to use Haskell stuff does.) In 
short, lots of Haskell-related things seem to be extremely Unix-centric 
and downright unfriendly towards anybody trying to set things up on 
Windows. If I didn't already know a bit about Unix, I'd be *really* stuck!

Now, I have two questions for the cafe:

1. Did GHC ever include GLUT? Or is my memory really that defective? I'm 
*sure* it used to... but I don't see any note to say it was removed, so 
maybe it was only ever there on Unix?

2. Can anybody think of a way I can actually get this Tetris program to 
work?

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