On 22 August 2010 16:56, Tillmann Rendel
One needs a compiler and libraries on the one hand, and a bunch of command-line tools on the other hand. On Windows, MinGW provides the former, while Cygwin provides a package manager to install the latter.
Its not ideal to use MinGW with Cgywin. For Haskell development, you want to be linking to C libraries compiled with MinGW's GCC. You can use Cygwin, and cross compile with MinGW's GCC, but this is likely to be more tiresome than using MSys and makes a problem for every compile and build - as you are cross compiling you can't just ./configure && make && make install. Whereas MSys just has the initial problem that it no longer has a comprehensible install plan. The hyperbole in my original message was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but there's a fair amount of truth in it - MinGW / MSys is a very good system, its sad that it is in such a crazy state at the moment. MSys has all the tools (bash, perl, make, autoconf) needed for compiling and excepting the installer situation, it is very stable.