[Haskell-cafe] Cabal failures...

[Niklas Larsson]

I just want to say that Windows support is much better than one could
get the impression from this thread. I use Haskell on Windows as well
as OSX and Linux. I think it works very well now, previously one had
to know a bit of trickery to get things done.

I don't think I have run into any more trouble on Windows than on the
unixes, certainly there has been less headaches than with OSX (mostly
GHC there), and you don't get the distro-hackage tension as on Linux.
It is a bit annoying that packages depending on unix don't just quit
upfront instead of installing a scad of dependencies first. But a
mucked up package database that this thread is about can happen on any
platform.

The problem seems to be that cabal-install is so wonderfully easy to
use that it obscures that there are no guarantees that things will
just work and that it is often quite possible to fix it yourself by a
tweak. If people think that what "cabal install" does behind the
scenes is some advanced magic, it will not occur to them that they can
do cabal unpack, fix the problem, and then cabal configure, cabal
build and cabal install.

Niklas

2012/11/21 Erik de Castro Lopo <mle+hs at mega-nerd.com>:
> Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:
>
>> This counter-argument is flawed. Why limit oneself to one's own
>> household? (Garage? Basement?) Get out more! Visit a friend.
>
> If that friend is not a coder, they are unlikely to have the dev tools
> installed.
>
>> Talk to an
>> internet cafe owner for a special deal to run one's own programs.
>
> Ditto.
>
>> Rent virtual machine time in the cloud.
>
> I've already thrown a bunch of money at the microsoft machine for very
> poor results. If someone else set up and ran windows VMs and gave me
> access that would make testing on windows far more attractive.
>
> I just found that Amazon AWS has a free teir that includes windows
> as an option:
>
>     https://aws.amazon.com/free/
>
> Its still a huge sink of time and effort to set one up to a state where
> its ready to build haskell packages. Maybe if someone set up a github
> project that contained a script that could be downloaded onto a bare
> windows machine and then bootstrap that machine into a full haskell dev
> machine you might see some progress on this front.
>
> Erik
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> Erik de Castro Lopo
> http://www.mega-nerd.com/
>
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