[Haskell-cafe] ANN: "Real World Haskell", now shipping

[Andrew Coppin]

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On 2008 Dec 2, at 14:44, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Regardless, it has been my general experience that almost everything 
>> obtained from Hackage fails miserably to compile under Windows. 
>> (IIRC, one package even used a Bash script as part of the build 
>> process!) I haven't seen similar problems on Linux. (But I don't use 
>> Linux very often.) About the worst problem there was Gtk2hs being 
>> confused about some Autoconfig stuff or something...
>
>
> Many packages assume you have the msys / mingw stuff installed on 
> Windows (if they work at all; those of us who don't develop on Windows 
> wouldn't really know how to go about being compatible).
>

According to the Cabal experts, the issue is that Windows doesn't have a 
"standard" place for keeping header files like the various POSIX 
environments typically do. That means anything that binds an external C 
library (i.e., almost all useful Haskell packages) don't easily work on 
Windows. I'm not sure what the solution to this is...