[Haskell-cafe] Re: building "encoding" on Windows?

[John Lato]

> Message: 20
> Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:45:49 +0100
> From:
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] building "encoding" on Windows?
> To: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Message-ID: <4BB1117D.5090709 at btinternet.com>
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>
> wagnerdm at seas.upenn.edu wrote:
>> Whooo, boy, I sure don't fancy explaining Msys/MinGW or Cygwin to a
>> non-technical person and giving sufficiently detailed
>> installation/usage instructions.
>
> I still dislike the idea of needing to install MSYS, MinGW, Cygwin or
> similar tools to get anything remotely interesting from Hackage to build
> on Windows.

I know this is an old topic, and I'm actually sympathetic to your
cause, but I really don't think asking Windows developers to install
MinGW or Cygwin is a problem.  You wouldn't distribute C# source code
and expect users to run that without Visual Studio, would you?
Packages on Hackage are *source distributions*, so users need a
development environment in order to make use of them.  Windows doesn't
have a built-in development environment, therefore I don't see any
reason why developers shouldn't choose the one most convenient to
them.

The only alternative is to make a binary distribution, which (as
you're discovering) has its own problems.

John