Hugs troubs: build from source on Windows

[Anthony Clayden]

Thank you Neil, I'm amazed anybody's still monitoring this forum. (I was
more posting for the sake of posterity/somebody else trying to revive Hugs.)

In that case, I'm sure you'll remember this ;-)

https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/hugs-bugs/2006-August/001612.html

I'm building Hugs from the Sep 2006 source, on a 64-bit Windows 8 machine,
using MinGW32.

The good news is it built and I can at least run the interpreter.

The bad news is I hacked and bumbled my way through, so I'm not sure what I
got. In particular, three .dll's didn't build, so I copied them over from
the binaries distro; then hacked the Makefile; then carried on. Those three
are

Ptr.dll; Alloc.dll; Error.dll  -- from corresponding .c in
./libraries/bootlib/Foreign, and sub-dirs.

Presumably the .c didn't compile. Those are three of the four .dll's
mentioned in your August 2006 message.

Can you remember any clues as to what was wrong or where to go looking?

I can explain the message in your post, because I got the same message in
an earlier attempt: "too many arguments to function 'mkdir'."

Microsoft in their wisdom changed the command. There's a call to it from
dirprim.c, guarded by a check of the HOST_OS. The August 2006 message is
wrt a call in HsBase.h, similarly guarded but maybe subtly different?:

    INLINE HsInt
    __hscore_mkdir( HsAddr pathName, HsInt mode )
    {  ...  mkdir  ... }

Full disclosure: I got the error re 'mkdir' when I was trying to compile
under MSys2 -- trying to be modern. That gives a HOST_OS of 'msys', and
Hugs just doesn't know about it. I tried hacking config.sub, but ran into
more and more trouble in other places. Eventually I abandoned MSys2 and
fell back to old MSys vintage 2011.


Thank you for any pointers(!) And thank you Hugs team for such a
robust/long-lived piece of software. Building Hugs (or at least building
whatever I've got) has been less trouble than GHC on Windows looks to be
https://mmhaskell.com/blog/2018/6/11/contributing-to-ghc-1-preparation


AntC


On Fri, 20 Jul 2018 at 9:40 PM, Neil Mitchell <redirect at vodafone.co.nz>
wrote:

> Hi Anthony,
>
> Thanks for finding it. I don't even know how to update the website.
> Ross (cc'd) might...
>
>
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