From Daniel Fischer:
I'm trying to set up a build/test environment on Windows.
Building ghc (sh validate) fails after a while due to flex and bison crashing. Those two come with git and even $ flex --version (or bison) crashes, so they seem truly hosed.
Do I need flex/bison at all to build ghc? It seems they're not used on linux for building ghc. So, if not, how do I configure things that the build doesn't try to use bison/flex? If yes, would installing flex and bison from gnuwin32 work?
I ran into this issue last night as well. See http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5489 flex appears to be required from integer-gmp's ./configure for one of GMP's demo programs. (a calculator demo I think) I'm trying to see if a slightly newer msys installation process as listed in the Trac bug will take care of it. However, last night I got a stage 1 ghc seg fault while compiling some Haskell code further along in the build. I currently have a devel1 build in progress to see what I come up with next. I also ran into: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5488 about bootstrapping using the Windows 7.2.1 standalone bits to bootstrap ghc-HEAD. If the devel1 build doesn't give any useful symptoms to pass along I'll probably retry the build using the Haskell Platform compiler. Fyi, Bill