[nhc-bugs] Building nhc98 on Windows 2000

[C.Reinke]

Malcolm,

> > 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?

The real joke is that I was doing the whole thing in /tmp/nhc..,
so /tmp definitely existed and was writable, or I wouldn't even
have been able to unpack the stuff, let alone compile anything.

So there is something odd with that error message, which is why
I asked whether the symptoms ring a bell. Any ideas?

> >   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.  

So it seems. And I've seen you trying to follow ghc's development
here on numerous occasions. Given that you are all working to make
Haskell a better platform, why do you have to guess each other's
configuration info? 

Why not define the info everyone needs about each others
implementations, and put that into a well known place (a show-config
option to the compiler/interpreter, for instance). That would also
come in handy for bug reports, and implementers would be free to
change their code, as long as they still deliver the config data.

> Unfortunately, I'm not
> aware of any other way to reliably get config info out of GHC.

> 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.

As long as the gcc-route still works, that should be less of a
problem for those who want a ghc with everything stable, but without
the fun of compiling it. We'll see. One step after the other.

Cheers,
Claus