Alex
As Simon M says, if you (or anyone else) felt able to write up a standalone summary of what the problem is, and what the solution is, I'd love to add it to the GHC FAQ or documentation somewhere. In my experience, simply explaining the problem clearly is quite tricky. (E.g. the cygwin vs mingw issues, described in the Building Guide, took me ages to understand well enough to write down.)
Simon
I'll definitely defer to Claus on this one. I'm still "working through the issues" in places, but I don't yet have anything coherent to add. (This was all motivated, btw, by trying to build HaXml under ghc/cygwin, which fell for me at the first hurdle of "first catch your hmake" in the recipe. I've now gotten as far as a _build_ of hmake, but it then runs into similar issues with its own use of the f/s (rc files and what-not). If anyone has this one down pat already, they might save my tired brain some pain, otherwise I'll summarise to the list if and when I get some sort of resolution myself.) Cheers, Alex.