Remaining bugs in Cabal under Windows

[Isaac Jones]

"Simon Marlow" <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:

> On 16 August 2004 19:20, Krasimir Angelov wrote:
>
>>      There still exists some bugs in Cabal when it is
>> used under Windows.
>> 
>>    - The platform dependent places in the code are
>> marked with #ifdef mingw32_TARGET_OS but this macro is
>> never defined ever under Windows. You must add
>> -Dmingw32_TARGET_OS to the command line while building
>> setup.exe and also add -Dmingw32_TARGET_OS to
>> options-ghc field in Setup.description.
>
> I'll fix this.  Isaac: is it ok for me to commit fixes to the
> repository?  

Sure, though I'm just as happy to accept the output from "darcs send"
and integrate the patches in myself.  I'm not sure that the test suite
works everywhere, so I like to run the test suite myself.  It would be
nice if the test suite were actually portable, though.

I have a patch of Krasimir's that I was just trying to push, but I
can't reach cvs.haskell.org at the moment.

(snip)
>>    - The package uses (getEnv "HOME") to get the path
>> to home directory. The variable isn't present in plain
>> Command prompt under Windows.
>
> Agreed.  I need to know the equivalent of $HOME for GHC too, so that GHC
> can keep a per-user package database.

(snip)

>> on my PC. The trouble here is that to do that I need
>> to add shell32 to extra-libs field in package
>> description. I don't have a way to preprocess
>> Setup.description so I can't add shell32
>> conditionally.
>> I would like to have a collection of functions like:
>> 
>> getCurrentDirectory
>
> we already have that
>
>> getAppUserDataDirectory
>> getHomeDirectory
>
> Maybe - although the conventions still differ between Unix and Windows.
> On Unix, to store per-user data you would use <homedir>/.<app> whereas
> on Windows you use <homedir>/<app>.  So I think the win32 library should
> provide access to getAppUserDataDirectory, and the app code still needs
> to be conditionally compiled.

For what it's worth, I've been collecting various path-related
functions and dumping them here, with the hope of organizing them
later:

darcs get http://www.syntaxpolice.org/darcs_repos/OS.Path/

Thank you both for your work on this, let me know how I can help :)

peace,

  isaac