Re: GHC on Win32 strangeness

Bryn is trying to compile C->Haskell with GHC on Win32, but ran into some problems. Firstly, configure says,

$ ./configure loading cache ./config.cache checking host system type... i686-pc-cygwin checking target system type... i686-pc-cygwin checking build system type... i686-pc-cygwin checking for Cygwin environment... (cached) no checking for gcc... (cached) gcc [..]

Don't know about this one, sorry. Maybe playing with the --build/--host/--target parameters might help: ./configure --help should give you some information.

So, it says no Cygwin, but identifies the system as i686-pc-cygwin. AFAIK, GHC uses mingw32 these days, doesn't it? How can this be reliably tested for? (To exclude -package posix on that platform.)

Secondly, are there any issues with symlinks? I append a sequence of commands that seems to indicate that GHC doesn't find a file, because it is symlinked.

GHC doesn't know about Cygwin symbolic links. One way to deal with this is to hand patch configure to use "cp" instad of "ln -s" wherever needed. Another way might be to use the mingw32 MSYS environment, which is a Cygwin branch hosting Mingw32 tools in a Posix setting, so that configure works a-la Cygwin, but the output executables are normal Mingw32 programs - ie, they know nothing about Cygwinisms. Certain other gotcha's associated with Mingw32 under Cygwin are also removed. They are currently focused on the symlink problem.