[Haskell-cafe] Cabal

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2009-11-08 at 19:29 -0800, Philippos Apolinarius wrote:
> I made small improvements in the Small Japi Binding, and asked how to
> make it available. I received a few private messages advising me to
> build and package the library using a tool called cabal. Since I have
> used installation tools for PLT, R  and LaTeX libraries, I thought
> cabal was something similar. However, I noticed that there are a lot
> of complaints against cabal.  Therefore, I decided to install cabal,
> and try it. It seems that it is easier to install packages by hand
> than using cabal.  Here is a typical cabal session:
> 
> D:\ghc\ghcapi>cabal update
> Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org
> 
> D:\ghc\ghcapi>cabal install mkcabal
> Resolving dependencies...
> Downloading pcre-light-0.3.1...
> Configuring pcre-light-0.3.1...
> Downloading readline-1.0.1.0...
> Configuring readline-1.0.1.0...
> cabal: Error: some packages failed to install:
> mkcabal-0.4.2 depends on readline-1.0.1.0 which failed to install.
> pcre-light-0.3.1 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
> exit: ExitFailure 1
> readline-1.0.1.0 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
> exit: ExitFailure 1

Hmm, I get a slightly different error that indicates somewhat better the
actual cause. It says that it cannot find sh.exe.

The real problem here is that those two packages use ./configure
scripts. Those rarely work under windows. For starters you need msys and
mingw installed. Even once you've done that however we get the problem
of missing C libs.

Duncan