[Haskell-cafe] Cabal fun [Half-integer]

[Andrew Coppin]

Jason Dagit wrote:
>
>
> On Mon, Jun 29, 2009 at 11:57 AM, Andrew Coppin 
> <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com <mailto:andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>> wrote:
>
>     Rather less fortunately, it still doesn't actually fix my problem:
>
>     E:\Haskell\AOC-HalfInteger>cabal configure
>     Resolving dependencies...
>     Configuring AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...
>
>     E:\Haskell\AOC-HalfInteger>cabal sdist
>
>     Building source dist for AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...
>     Preprocessing library AOC-HalfInteger-1.0...
>     Source tarball created: dist\AOC-HalfInteger-1.0.tar.gz
>     cabal:
>     dist\src\sdist.1288\AOC-HalfInteger-1.0\Data\HalfInteger.hs:
>     removeFile: permission denied (Permission denied)
>
>     I have no idea what the hell it's upset about now... I've now been
>     trying to create this damned tarball since 5PM yesterday, and I
>     still haven't managed it. At this point I'm losing the will to
>     continue with this crazy project. Clearly this is way too much
>     effort to expend just to upload 50 lines of code.
>
>
> I can't say for certain, but just reading the output it looks like it 
> created a tarball in a temporary folder (that worked) and then when it 
> tried to clean it up it failed.  Sounds like a bug report is in order.

So, yet again, it appears I'm the first poor soul to try using this on 
Windows.

The very first time I tried to use Gtk2hs, the installer for Windows was 
trivially broken. In fairness, Duncan fixed this within an hour or two 
of me pointing out the problem. But the fact remains: It had been out 
for a week, and I was the *only* person to have tried to use it on 
Windows. (Or possibly the only person to actually complain, rather than 
just give up.) Don kept telling me about some cool Core syntax hilighter 
he wrote, so I went to all the trouble of downloading it, downloading 
and building all of its dependencies, only to discover "oh, by the way, 
it only works on Linux". A while back Cabal had a bug where (on Windows 
only) it couldn't find ld or something daft. [Again, fortunately that 
one got corrected - eventually - in the next GHC release.] I try to run 
sdist, and discover that that's broken on Windows too. But don't worry, 
there's a replacement tool... which is also broken on Windows... This is 
an exercise in pure frustration! Sometimes it seems as if *everything* 
is broken on Windows.

Hmm... I'm just ranting now. One presumes that when they "fixed" cabal 
sdist to work on Windows, at least one person checked that it did, in 
fact, work. That would mean it got broken again at some point after 
this. Maybe I just need to find an older version or something...

And after that... I guess I create *another* account on *another* bug 
tracker and submit *another* "hey, this is broken on Windows" ticket...