[nhc-bugs] Building nhc98 on Windows 2000

[Malcolm Wallace]

Claus,

> Ok, tried that (with the patches and with the include-modifications).
> It seems to run into a problem as well (haven't had time to look
> into this yet, but just in case you recognise the symptoms):
> 
>   hmake-config: Starting new config from scratch.
>   cannot create /tmp/hmakeconfig.1748: permission denied

Yuk.  Is the existence of a writable /tmp something I can't assume
on Cygwin/Windows either?

>   grep: /cygdrive/c/ghc/ghc-5.02.2/bin/ghc: No such file or directory

Ah, yes I think I remember reading once that GHC/mingw32 does not have
a driver script, only a directly executable binary.  Hence, grepping
through the script for configuration information (as hmake-config is
attempting to do here) is no longer an option.  Unfortunately, I'm not
aware of any other way to reliably get config info out of GHC.

>   hmake-config: compiler not known:
>     '/tmp/nhc98-1.12/script/nhc98'

This error is only due to the non-writable /tmp file, so it isn't so serious.

> > So did I, but GHC's move away from Cygwin to support a native Windows
> > configuration seems to have broken several things that used to work.
> 
> Yeah, "never change a winning team", they say.

Sadly, the difficulty of using GHC/mingw32 as a bootstrapping compiler
seems to be increasing the more we delve into it.  Perhaps it would
be safest for us simply to recommend GHC/cygwin instead, and disallow
the GHC/mingw32 route.

Regards,
    Malcolm