Duncan Coutts wrote:
Tim Docker wrote:
Is it actually reasonable to expect any cabal packages that depend on external c libraries and headers to build out of the box on windows?
How can cabal find out where those files are, without requiring a config file to be edited?
It's usually worse than that. The most likely situation is that the C library and header files are not even installed. This is a big problem for all packages that wrap C libs.
I wonder if this could be addressed by discarding the desire to run magically "out of the box", but make the requirements clearer. Currently the choices seem to be: * Require the user to install these libs+headers "just right" (on the PATH or in certain MSYS directories) so that they are found. * Edit the cabal package file to point to the libs+headers Perhaps a worthwhile addition to cabal would be for it to be able to read a local config file, in which a user would specify where each package should get the necessary headers and libs? You'd manually create this file, maybe like: package: SDL include-dirs: c:\libs\SDL\include lib-dirs: c:\libs\SDL\lib package: curl include-dirs: c:\dev\mycurl\include lib-dirs: c:\dev\mycurl\lib When building a package X, cabal would consult this file to work out localised options for that package. Tim