In celebration of Hackage reachin over 1,000 unique packages, I decided that I would re-visit the problem of attempting to build them on Windows. I began by removing all existing Haskellness from my PC. I now have a vanilla Windows XP (32-bit) system with Service Pack 3. So, let's see what we can do here... - Install GHC 6.10.1. As you'd expect, no issues here. - Now, let's install stream-fusion. First let me ch... woah! What the hell? OK, it seems that Google is temporarily "broken". (All websites show up as "this site may damange your computer".) Obviously this has nothing to do with Haskell, but it makes navigating Hackage moderately more tedious. Oh well, anyway, where was I? Ah yes, I already have the tarball for stream-fusion-0.1.1, but I see that the latest release is 0.1.2.1. (Unfortunately, there doesn't appear to be any way to determine what the difference is between the two versions...) - Right, I've got the tarball for stream-fusion. Now let's see if it will install... J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup configure J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup build J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup install J:\Haskell\unpack> ghc-pkg list ...stream-fusion-0.1.2.1... OK, nothing much wrong with that then. :-D - Hmm, doesn't GHC 6.10.1 now come with Haddock included? I wonder if there's a way to ask Cabal to build the docs for me... [Grr! Google is still busted.] Ah, yes there is. OK, let's try this: J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup haddock ... Data\Stream.hs:292:33: parse error on input `!' haddock: Failed to check module: Data.Stream Uh... OK. So I guess I *won't* build the docs for that one then. :-/ Oh well, maybe it's a one-off failure? Let's try some more packages... - Next up, let's try the excellent ansi-terminal package. Checking Hackage [again without Google] and I see that the tarball I've got is still the latest version (0.5.0). Let's see what happens now... J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup configure J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup build J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup haddock J:\Haskell\unpack> runhaskell Setup install J:\Haskell\unpack> ghc-pkg list ...ansi-terminal-0.5.0... Well, that installed OK. And look... it's given me a little folder full of Haddock documentation. How nice! Pitty it's burried 5 subfolders deep on the system drive with no hyperrefs to it... but I guess I could just bookmark the root folder or something? That'll work. (I.e., when I add more packages, it'll still be easy to navigate to their documentation this way.) - Now on to the ambiguously-named "binary" package. Again, I have a tarball for 0.4.2 but the latest is 0.4.4. (And, again, no indication of how this is different. But let's hope the difference is that it's fixed to work with GHC 6.10...) Configure, build, Haddock, install... no issues. That's refreshing. - OK, so what have we done? We've done stream-fusion, which is 100% Haskell. We've done ansi-terminal, which only links to standard Win32 headers [which, oddly, seem to come bundled with GHC]. And we've done binary, which (I think!) comes bundled with a few small snippets of C. Now let's try something harder... - Gtk2hs doesn't seem to want to work with GHC 6.10 yet; that's a pitty. It's a nice library. OTOH, how many Windows users have GTK+ installed? It's fairly uncommon. Fortunately you can just bundle the DLLs along with your app; unfortunately there's *a lot* of them, and they're quite large. And, obviously, you get a very non-native look & feel. Still, it *is* a nice library, and I'm sure at some point people will hassle Duncan to the point where an update appears. ;-) - A better choice, theoretically, should be wxHaskell. As I understand it, wxWidgets is supposed to look native. (Do you still have to bundle a DLL? Or is it statically linked in? Or...?) Oh well, I'd like to at least try it out and see how it works... Hmm, looks like you can obtain it via Cabal, or there's a special Windows build where you just run a BAT file and it registers everything for you. Let's try that first... "Click on the newly created wxhaskell-0.11.0\bin\wxhaskell-register.bat program to register the wxHaskell package. To uninstall, you can click on wxhaskell-0.11.0\bin\wxhaskell-unregister.bat and than remove the wxhaskell-0.11.0 directory." That sounds easy. Let's try it... 1 file(s) copied. 1 file(s) copied. 1 file(s) copied. - register packages 'ghc-pkg' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. 'ghc-pkg' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. error: Unable to register the package using "ghc-pkg". Maybe you have an incompatible version of ghc installed? Press any key to continue . . . Uh... what? OK, let's see if I can figure out what this batch file is trying to do... Er... wow. o_O Alright, there's no way I'm going to figure this out. I can't even tell where it's trying to install to or anything. Hmm. Well, it looks like it's all compiled and it's just trying to copy a few files and register them with GHC. That's probably a lot simpler than trying to actually compile from source using Cabal. I don't know what's confusing it, but maybe somebody in HCafe will know? I'm going to leave this one for now... - Another exciting package is the Haskell binding for libSDL. I am just *dying* to start doing some sound coding with Haskell, so I'm very interested in getting this one to work. Last time I tried it failed miserably, but let's see what we get this time around... Hmm, OK. Well let me see now... There's a project on Sourceforge called "hSDL" which seems to be dated Apr 2005. Then there's a thing called "hsSDL" on somebody's website dated around Feb 2008. And finally on Hackage itself there's a "SDL-0.5.4" dated Apr 2008. Oh... goodie. Well, let's go with the latest date, shall we? OK, download SDL-0.5.4. Unpack. Let's see if there's any useful documentation in here... Ah, "Win32". What does that contain? Mmm, looks useful. OK, let's follow these instructions and see what I get... Need to grab libSDL... Downloaded SDL-devel-1.2.13-mingw32.tar.gz. Unpacked it to C:\SDL. OK, now what? Ooo, manually edit the Cabal file... goodie! OK, well this shouldn't be too hard... Right, now... configure... That looked OK... build... Preprocessing library SDL-0.5.4... Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:1:17: SDL.h: No such file or directory Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc: In function `main': Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:57: error: `SDL_INIT_TIMER' undeclared (first use in this function) Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:57: error: (Each undeclared identifier is reported o nly once Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:57: error: for each function it appears in.) Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:58: error: `SDL_INIT_AUDIO' undeclared (first use in this function) Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:59: error: `SDL_INIT_VIDEO' undeclared (first use in this function) Graphics\UI\SDL\General.hsc:60: error: `SDL_INIT_CDROM' undeclared (first use in ...etc... OK, that's fantastic. Now what? So where *is* SDL.H then? Ah, it's in C:\SDL\include\SDL. Maybe if I adjust the Cabal path... configure... build... OMG! It looks like that might even have worked... Haddock... install... Well, well! That seems to have worked! Right, are there any example programs with this puppy?... No, there aren't. Apparently. Well that keeps things interesting... OK, well it looks like Graphcs.UI.SDL.CPUInfo is trivial, so let's see if I can compile a short program that calls it. Right, well it compiles. Does it run? ...no. It can't find SDL.dll. Presumably if I insert that into my search path somewhere... woo! It works! :-D Right, well. I guess if I can find some nontrivial examples from somewhere, I can try this thing out properly. (Looking at the API documentation, it's not very obvious how to do anything with it...) - OK, well I guess this message is long enough already. I notice there's a brand new version of HDBC out, so tomorrow I'm going to attempt to finally make a Haskell program actually talk to a database. ;-) TO BE CONTINUED...