[Haskell-cafe] Compiling Yi's Dependencies on Windows

[Jeff Wheeler]

Hey all,

Yi has a lot of dependencies that currently make it a pain to install
on Windows, so I'm wondering which of those can be streamlined for
easier install on Windows. So far, I haven't succeeded at getting them
to work on my own machine, and I've already spent a lot of time on it.

The first major impediment is Gtk2Hs. Duncan has mostly resolved this
issue with a minimal build that works on 6.10.4 [1], but I think that
this should at least be mentioned on the Gtk2Hs site if it is
impossible for now to get cabal-install to work by itself.

Then comes bindings for things like curl (this may only be needed for
Darcs, I don't remember), zlib, and regex (POSIX). If I remember
correctly, zlib, or some other library, is able to ship with its
*.c/*.h files and compile them as necessary on Windows. Can this be
done for regex-posix and curl, too? On my system now, I've got both
GnuWin32 and MSYS (MinGW) installed in attempts to get regex headers
that work with regex-posix, but, at the moment, I've run into a wall,
in which I get this error when loading or linking to regex-posix (it
compiles fine itself):

ghc.exe: C:\...\cabal\regex-posix-0.94.1\ghc-6.10.4\HSregex-posix-0.94.1.o:
unknown symbol `_regerror'
Loading package regex-posix-0.94.1 ... linking ... ghc.exe: unable to
load package `regex-posix-0.94.1'

I doubt most of these changes are significant (like linking on the
gtk2hs site to the 6.10.4 build), but changing them could make many
apps easier to install on Windows, not just Yi.

Are there any other dependencies that have trouble on Windows which I
haven't run into yet? If they're library dependencies, can the headers
be included in the Hackage tarball?

Jeff Wheeler