[Haskell-cafe] More problems [Tetris]

[Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH]

On Nov 22, 2007, at 14:22 , Andrew Coppin wrote:

> My first question would be:
>
> - Is there a viable alternative to sh scripts for installing packages?
>
> If there is, it would seem it's just an issue of getting everybody  
> to migrate to it. If there isn't, it looks like we need to make one...

ActiveState Perl?

Unfortunately, as long as you can't guarantee everything being  
installed in consistent places and/or invoked in consistent ways  
(which on Windows is well-nigh impossible due to conflicting version  
requirements) you need a way to search the system for stuff.  If you  
don't want to require that people on Windows have a reasonable  
scripting language installed for such, you get to bundle (or write) one.

It would be nice if Windows devs had come up with something like pkg- 
config; it'd be possible to do a minimal implementation just using  
CMD.EXE scripts (don't bother with the full GNU pkg-config framework,  
just have each package bundle a %foo%-CONFIG.CMD that dumps  
locations, compiler flags, etc. in an easily parsed form) and then a  
relatively simple Haskell module could check for packages by running  
their config scripts.  But this requires convincing all the non- 
Haskell third party libraries (GLUT, SDL, etc.) to add config scripts  
to their distributions; practically, I don't see this happening.

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery at kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery at ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH