Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: "Real World Haskell", now shipping

andrewcoppin:

Jason Dusek wrote:

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Andrew Coppin wrote:

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...it has been my general experience that almost everything obtained from Hackage fails miserably to compile under Windows. (IIRC, one package even used a Bash script as part of the build process!) I haven't seen similar problems on Linux. (But I don't use Linux very often.)

I try very hard to make my programs work on Windows; and indeed, one of things I appreciate about Haskell is how easy it is to create binaries and packages that are cross platform.

Certainly the one or two "pure Haskell" packages out there (e.g., PureMD5) seem to build without issue. The trouble is that almost all useful Haskell packages are bindings to C libraries, and that varies by platform. :-(

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However, the only time I actually use Windows is to build and test my Haskell packages. Most of the people on this list -- and I wager, most people on the mailing lists for any open source programming language -- are working on a NIXalike; we can work with bug reports, but we can't very well be the fabled "many eyeballs" on a platform we don't use. Ask not what your Haskell can do for you, but rather what you can do for your Haskell :)

As I say, last time I tried this, I'd just failed to build half a dozen other interesting packages, so by the time I'd got to trying to get database access working, I was frustrated to the point of giving up.

Do you mail the maintainers when there's a bulid failure? There's around 1000 packages on hackage now, and we don't have a build farm, so you can make a real difference by mailing authors when their package fails on windows. -- Don