[Haskell-cafe] Improving Haskell on Windows by adding it to TakeoffGW

[Hamish Mackenzie]

Finally someone has created a working MinGW distribution with a package manager!
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/takeoffgw/index.php?title=Main_Page

Pier11 has done a great job of making MinGW libraries, tools and apps easy to install.  It may seem limited at this stage (compared to what is available on linux), but it is a darn site better than fishing around for a combination of prebuilt binaries or building everything from source.

I think we should embrace this project and try to add support for installing Haskell using it (GHC, Haskell Platform, Darcs, Gtk2Hs, Leksah, ...).

You can read the comments here to get a feel for just how Windows users feel about TakeoffGW...
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/c9duj/takeoffgw_mingw_based_distribution_with_a

I tried it out myself and had Gtk2Hs and Leksah up and running in no time using TakeoffGW to install all the prerequisites.

Hamish