[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: Sifflet visual programming language, release 1.0!

[Andrew Coppin]

gdweber at iue.edu wrote:
> Thanks for the report!
>
> It surprises me that curl is a problem.
> I see on the curl web site there are multiple versions
> for Windows:
>   

The problem is not usually that the C library doesn't exist for Windows 
(they tend to be widely portable, in fact). Rather, the problem is that 
Cabal won't build the Haskell binding. I've tried in the past, and I've 
never yet got it to work even once. The only known exception is Gtk2hs, 
which somehow manages to build on Windows.

In the case of Curl, Cabal downloads it, unpacks it, sees that it uses a 
autoconf script and dies. (At least Cabal now correctly reports the 
/cause/ of the problem - the configure script.) Things like autoconf, 
automake, bash, sed, awk, etc. do not usually exist on Windows, so any 
packages that require these tools won't build. And even the packages 
that don't usually fall over being unable to find the C headers in 
C:\usr\local or something dumb like that.

> I think the dependency on curl comes through my using hxt 
> to process the SiffML XML files --
> it's unfortunate, because Sifflet doesn't really need curl
> for what it's doing: because all the XML files are local,
> there's no need for network access.  HXT is rather a *large* package!
>   

...in other words, it's an unfortunate indirect dependency. Welcome to 
automatic dependency tracking. :-)

Now, if Curl was in the Haskell Platform (i.e., pre-built for me)...