From: Andrew Coppin
A new version is due to be release pretty soon (somewhere begin april). It has Mingw and Msys included, and also some pre-built binaries like cabal and haddock.
Plain GHC has included Haddock for a while now. It seems to me that including the entirity of MinGW and MSYS is overkill, but what do I know about the matter? I was however under the impression that to use Unix emulators such as these, you have to run everything from a seperate shell rather than the usual Windows shell.
MSys is probably unnecessary, but mingw is necessary to to get configure scripts to run. I wholeheartedly applaud including both of these, because a lot more of hackage will really be just a "cabal install" away. MSys is the separate shell, but you can use mingw with the Windows "cmd" shell if you wish.
My hope is that the more useful C libraries will get added to HP so that I can start using them. (E.g., I'd love to be able to do sound synthesis using Haskell, but there aren't any libraries for accessing the sound hardware...)
I've gotten portaudio to work on Windows. You'll probably need to build and install the C portaudio library manually. John