Cabal 1.4.0.2 won't configure on Vista

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2008-09-27 at 11:46 -0700, Justin Bailey wrote:
> As I posted in ticket #360
> (http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/360), the latest Cabal
> on hackage won't configure on Vista. Using GHC 6.8.3, when I run the
> "configure" command, I get this error:
> 
> "During interactive linking, GHCi couldn't find the following symbol:
> 
> SHGetFolderPathA at 20

> Any ideas?

The README file in the Cabal-1.4.0.2 tarball suggests:

    ghc --make Setup
    ./Setup configure --user
    ./Setup build
    ./Setup install

The reason it imports SHGetFolderPath is to find the location of the
Program Files directory. Unfortunately that is not provided by either
System.Directory or anything in the Win32 binding package so we have to
directly FFI import that ourselves. Unfortunately ghci does not know to
link in the appropriate dll (and there's no automatic way for us to tell
it) so Cabal will not work in ghci by default. You can either compile it
(because gcc does link in the lib by default) or add something like
-lshell32 when invoking ghci/runghc.

If anyone would like to comment on this issue, please use ticket #325:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/ticket/325


Duncan