[Haskell-cafe] When is extra-libraries config in .cabal

I am building and running some haskelldb/HDBC/HSQL libraries on Windows XP (using the MinGW minimals system (MSYS)) with GHC environment. I ran into runtime link problems, foreign functions would not found. eg. atoi,from C standard; recv from sockets. To solve the problem, I added dll's to the build configuration field "extra-libraries", MSVCRT (c runtime), KERNEL32, WSOCK32 (sockets). This solved the problem. 1. But is there a better way to solve the problem? I am expecting that those libraries are available through the OS and do not need explicit loading. I am confuse by what does the loading of the libraries. 2. Does a UNIX/POSIX system not have this problem? Information for understanding this problem would be great. Edward Ing