Friends Can anyone help Tim with this? Tim, it'd be a good idea to say what version of Cabal you are using (cabal --version). Also you can download a pre-compiled cabal binary I believe, which would save you cabal-installing it. (Although it seems bad that you can get into a situation where that's necesary.) Simon -----Original Message----- From: Tim Sheard [mailto:sheard@cs.pdx.edu] Sent: 28 January 2011 22:48 To: Simon Peyton-Jones Subject: Problems with the directory package on windows Simon, I have been wrestling with following problem. I cannot get the Directory package to install on windows. Normally this comes with the Haskell Platform, but out of the box, it gives an error message that it can't find the directory package, even though ghc-pkg says its there. If you try and install it you get: Resolving dependencies... Downloading directory-1.1.0.0... Configuring directory-1.1.0.0... configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-compiler checking for gcc... gcc checking whether the C compiler works... yes checking for C compiler default output file name... a.exe checking for suffix of executables... .exe checking whether we are cross compiling... no checking for suffix of object files... o checking whether we are using the GNU C compiler... yes checking whether gcc accepts -g... yes checking for gcc option to accept ISO C89... none needed checking how to run the C preprocessor... gcc -E checking for grep that handles long lines and -e... /usr/bin/grep checking for egrep... /usr/bin/grep -E checking for ANSI C header files... yes checking for sys/types.h... yes checking for sys/stat.h... yes checking for stdlib.h... yes checking for string.h... yes checking for memory.h... yes checking for strings.h... yes checking for inttypes.h... yes checking for stdint.h... yes checking for unistd.h... yes checking for sys/types.h... (cached) yes checking for unistd.h... (cached) yes checking for sys/stat.h... (cached) yes configure: creating ./config.status config.status: creating include/HsDirectoryConfig.h config.status: include/HsDirectoryConfig.h is unchanged configure: WARNING: unrecognized options: --with-compiler cabal.exe: Missing dependency on a foreign library: * Missing header file: HsDirectory.h This problem can usually be solved by installing the system package that provides this library (you may need the "-dev" version). If the library is already installed but in a non-standard location then you can use the flags --extra-include-dirs= and --extra-lib-dirs= to specify where it is. cabal.exe: Error: some packages failed to install: directory-1.1.0.0 failed during the configure step. The exception was: ExitFailure 1 Some one suggested I need to update cabal, but cabal needs directory so it won't update, and both cabal install cabal-install cabal install cabal end in exactly the same kind of error. Have you ever seen this problem. I have searched everywhere for similar questions and have struggled several weeks with this. Any suggestions. Tim Sheard