Re: [Haskell-cafe] 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!

31 Jan 2009

      sebastian.sylvan:
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From: "Don Stewart" 
Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 8:35 PM
To: "Andrew Coppin" 
Cc: 
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!
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andrewcoppin:
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In celebration of Hackage reachin over 1,000 unique packages, I decided
that I would re-visit the problem of attempting to build them on Windows.
Ah yes, I already have the tarball for stream-fusion-0.1.1, but I see
that the latest release is 0.1.2.1. (Unfortunately, there doesn't appear
to be any way to determine what the difference is between the two
versions...)
the true way to install all of hackage is:
cabal install $(all my packages)
where cabal install solves it all.
If that had actually worked it would be great.... I must say that my own 
not-so-random sampling (basically "ooh that looks cool, let's try it") is 
probably at a 20% success rate or so... It's great when it does work, but 
it usually doesn't.
Usually it fails because some part of it tries to run unix shell scripts 
(and I try to avoid things which seem like they're unix only, even though 
they're no easy way of determining this, so these are packages that at 
least to me seemed like they could be perfectly portable if not for 
unix-specific installation procedures).
Windows people need to set up a windows@haskell.org to sort out their
packaging issues, like we have for debian, arch, gentoo, freebsd and
other distros.

Unless people take action to get things working well on their platform,
it will be slow going.

-- Don