[Haskell-cafe] Terminal Win32/Building Haskeline/8.3 file issue

[Matthew Lamari]

Hit this compiling darcs on a new machine. . . .  But it may be more
generic to Haskell platform itself.  Bottom line, it presents a
situation where someone could end up dead-in-the-water with respect to
using haskell libraries.  I burned a lot of time tracking this down, it
may discourage users from the platform.

The problem manifests itself when your Win32 home directory has a long
name (or one with a space) and you're compiling haskeline, linking on
the 15th step.  Basically, ld.exe croaks when fed one of these names
rather than an 8.3

I can provide more specific details on the point of failure on request;
but it was a pain to track down.  Maybe a change to the linker, or some
specific project, may get rid of the 8.3 dependency.

A solution that got me out was to enable 8.3 on the volume, and on the
user directory.

A fix:
Logging in as a *different* user:

Open a command prompt with Administrator priveleges


fsutil 8dot3name query c:
(tells you the current status - you probably see a 2 - volume-select of
the feature)

fsutil 8dot3name set c: 1
(This sets volume c to create 8.3 names - for future files only)

fsutil file setshortname "c:\Users\YouHaveA VeryBigName" YOUHAV~1
(This only works if you're not logged in as 'YouHaveA VeryBigName',
otherwise the directory will be in-use).  You need this step as even
though you've changed the policy on 8.3 naming, this directory was
probably made during the prior policy)

dir /-n
(This shows you the 8.3-sensitive names.  You see YOUHAV~1 in the list,
you got it right)

The user may need to uninstall and reinstall haskell-platform, and wipe
all Cabal and GHC directories under AppData/Roaming






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