[Haskell-cafe] Solutions for multi-platform compilation?

[Ivan Perez]

Hi,
 I work developing multi-platform applications in Haskell. This poses
the following problem: I cannot compile binaries for windows from
linux (AFAIK). I "solved" this problem with the following
sledgehammer:  I installed windows in a VM, I installed GHC, I
installed all the C/C++ headers & binaries of the libraries that I use
(Gtk, OpenGL, SDL, OpenCV, etc.) their Haskell counterparts, and I
created several scripts that connect to the VM using SSH, push the
changes to the repo, cabal clean & cabal install all my packages in
sequence without me having to even login into the windows machine. I
did this because I was unable to get GHC to run properly in Wine at
that time (over 2 years ago).

 This solution is still unsatisfactory because:
 1) It's slow, even though Windows itself works fine (well, as well as
windows can work, but it runs at a decent spped, I can play games and
all).
 2) When I update a library with lots of dependencies, or GHC itself,
I have to rebuild almost everything. This is particularly painful with
big packages like Gtk, for instance. Because I have to tell cabal
where headers and libraries are located, updating a package is almost
never an automatic process. I haven't always been able to make GHC
"just pick them up" properly with pkg-config.
 3) When I make a change in a library with lots of dependencies,
recompiling all the packages can take several hours.

I don't think it's a problem with my machine: I'm giving a fair amount
of resources to windows, and I use a 3Ghz quadcore with 8GB of RAM.

Another relevant fact is: I use this for commercial purposes. I have
customers, each requiring a completely different program, they do not
have infinite budgets and, if there's a problem in the compilation
process and something requires my attention and manual intervention
too often, my salary per hour can easily drop to a ridiculous amount.
If I'm going to redo this, I'd rather just redo it once.

Any suggestions? How do you solve this kind of problem in your work environment?

Cheers,
Ivan