Message: 20 Date: Mon, 29 Mar 2010 21:45:49 +0100 From: Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] building "encoding" on Windows? To: haskell-cafe@haskell.org Message-ID: <4BB1117D.5090709@btinternet.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
wagnerdm@seas.upenn.edu wrote:
Whooo, boy, I sure don't fancy explaining Msys/MinGW or Cygwin to a non-technical person and giving sufficiently detailed installation/usage instructions.
I still dislike the idea of needing to install MSYS, MinGW, Cygwin or similar tools to get anything remotely interesting from Hackage to build on Windows.
I know this is an old topic, and I'm actually sympathetic to your cause, but I really don't think asking Windows developers to install MinGW or Cygwin is a problem. You wouldn't distribute C# source code and expect users to run that without Visual Studio, would you? Packages on Hackage are *source distributions*, so users need a development environment in order to make use of them. Windows doesn't have a built-in development environment, therefore I don't see any reason why developers shouldn't choose the one most convenient to them. The only alternative is to make a binary distribution, which (as you're discovering) has its own problems. John