[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] GHC 6.10 and OpenGL

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-11-23 at 08:00 -0500, Paul L wrote:
> On 11/23/08, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
> >> 2. It still wouldn't work for the OpenGL package on Windows, because
> >> the configure scripts require a Unix-style built environment
> >> (MinGW/MinSys or Cygwin).
> >
> > Yes, building it requires mingw/msys, but with it cabal install opengl
> > really does work (I've tried it).
> 
> Sure, I don't doubt it. The real trouble is the extra dependency to
> MinGW/MinSys.
> I'm reluctant to tell my users to go installing them just for the sake
> of compiling HOpenGL.

Sure, we're currently in an intermediate situation where the ghc release
is smaller but we've not had the first platform release yet.

We're only suggesting cabal install opengl on windows for developers,
not for your users.

> On a side note, since GHC installation for Windows contains a version
> of gcc, I wonder how hard it would be to replace the autoconf
> compilation of HOPenGL with just cabal. Then we'll get rid of the
> MinGW/MinSys depedency all together. Isn't it the purpose of cabal to
> replace non-portable build systems (for Haskell at least)?

That may well be possible and wherever it is possible we should do it.
The MinGW dependency is certainly a pain. Consider this an invitation
for anyone to go take a look at the configure scripts for these packages
and see how easy they'd be to replace with pure Haskell in the Setup.hs.

Duncan