"#!..." (Re[2]: cabal configure screw-up)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2005-08-26 at 18:36 -0700, Frederik Eaton wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 26, 2005 at 09:37:20AM +0300, Krasimir Angelov wrote:

> > It isn't so easy to simulate #! behaviour in rawSystem because the
> > file path after #! is in Unix style. Cygwin keeps the mapping between
> > Unix style paths and the native Windows paths. Usually /usr/bin/sh is
> > mapped to something like c:\cygwin\bin\sh.exe. All executables which
> > are compiled with cygwin.dll runtime library are working with Unix
> > paths which are silently mapped to native paths. All GHC compiled
> > executables are linked to the native msvcrt.dll runtime library  so
> > they understands only the native paths. I don't think that rawSystem
> > should try to emulate Unix behaviour.
> 
> Then maybe Cabal needs to be linked to cygwin.dll? I don't know
> anything about Cygwin, or MinGW, or what the difference is between the
> two, but if a program written in Haskell running *within* Cygwin can't
> execute a #! script using rawSystem then something is wrong.

GHC on windows is now a native application and it compiles native
windows applications. That is it doesn't link with any unix emulation
libraries. For the vast majority of windows users this is a good thing.
(GHC has become vastly more popular amongst windows users since it
stopped depending on cygwin.)

I think we just have to accept that windows doesn't understand the #!
thing.

If fact cabal packages that use configure scripts are not going to be
portable to windows anyway since we cannot assume that users have
MinGW/cygwin installed. That is one of the reasons to favour the simple
cabal build system, because it will work on windows without any unix
utiities like sh & make etc.

Duncan