[Haskell-cafe] Haskell and DB : giving up

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2007-11-28 at 19:11 +0100, manu wrote:
> Hello
> 
> I've spent a few days trying to install all the packages required to  
> use HaskellDB with either MySQL or SQlite3
> (the only 2 DB the host I was thinking about is supporting)
> 
> Well, I am giving up ! I seriously regret replacing ghc-6.6 with  
> ghc-6.8, I didn't expect that building packages would be so ...
> unsucessfull and time-wasting.

Yes, you were unlucky in that you jumped in just after ghc 6.8.1 was
released and before 90% of the packages on hackage had been updated to
work with 6.8 yet. In the mean time you would indeed be better off with
6.6.

Our hackage infrastructure is still fairly immature and lacks any
mechanism for indicating which packages work on which platforms. I agree
it's frustrating. Then additionally there is the complication that many
packages that use C libs (like DB client libs) just don't build out of
the box on windows because the development files are not installed.
Probably the best eventual solution for Windows is to build
infrastructure to make binary packages for Windows. People are working
on that.

Duncan