[Haskell-cafe] Trying to install Cabal

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2009-02-20 at 09:19 -0500, David wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> I've just installed ghc (v 6.10.1) for Windows, and it seems to be
> installed correctly, and now I'm trying to install Cabal (v1.6.0.2),
> but I'm getting the following error message (along with a lot of
> warnings about a deprecated something-or-other, which I assume I can
> ignore):


> During interactive linking, GHCi couldn't find the following symbol:
>   SHGetFolderPathA at 20
> This may be due to you not asking GHCi to load extra object files,
> archives or DLLs needed by your current session.  Restart GHCi, specifying
> the missing library using the -L/path/to/object/dir and -lmissinglibname
> flags, or simply by naming the relevant files on the GHCi command line.
> Alternatively, this link failure might indicate a bug in GHCi.
> If you suspect the latter, please send a bug report to:
>   glasgow-haskell-bugs at haskell.org
> 
> Am I missing a dependency, or is ghc not installed properly, or am I
> doing something else wrong?

As Andrea (and the README file) say you need to

    ghc --make Setup
    ./Setup configure --user
    ... etc

The reason the first thing you tried did not work is due to:

#325 SHGetFolderPath requiered to configure cabal on windows
	http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/325

The solution is for some Windows person to update the Win32 binding
package to bind these functions, then we can import them directly rather
than having to FFI import them ourselves (which does not work in ghci
because we cannot tell ghci which extra dll libs are needed).

Duncan