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

[Don Stewart]

andrewcoppin:
> Jason Dusek wrote:
> >Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> >  
> >>...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.)
> >>    
> >
> >  I try very hard to make my programs work on Windows; and
> >  indeed, one of things I appreciate about Haskell is how easy
> >  it is to create binaries and packages that are cross platform.
> >  
> 
> Certainly the one or two "pure Haskell" packages out there (e.g., 
> PureMD5) seem to build without issue. The trouble is that almost all 
> useful Haskell packages are bindings to C libraries, and that varies by 
> platform. :-(
> 
> >  However, the only time I actually use Windows is to build and
> >  test my Haskell packages. Most of the people on this list --
> >  and I wager, most people on the mailing lists for any open
> >  source programming language -- are working on a NIXalike; we
> >  can work with bug reports, but we can't very well be the
> >  fabled "many eyeballs" on a platform we don't use. Ask not
> >  what your Haskell can do for you, but rather what you can do
> >  for your Haskell :)
> >  
> 
> As I say, last time I tried this, I'd just failed to build half a dozen 
> other interesting packages, so by the time I'd got to trying to get 
> database access working, I was frustrated to the point of giving up.
> 

Do you mail the maintainers when there's a bulid failure?
There's around 1000 packages on hackage now, and we don't have a build
farm, so you can make a real difference by mailing authors when their
package fails on windows.

-- Don