On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Andrew Coppin
Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
On 2008 Dec 2, at 14:44, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Regardless, 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.) About the worst problem there was Gtk2hs being confused about some Autoconfig stuff or something...
Many packages assume you have the msys / mingw stuff installed on Windows (if they work at all; those of us who don't develop on Windows wouldn't really know how to go about being compatible).
According to the Cabal experts, the issue is that Windows doesn't have a "standard" place for keeping header files like the various POSIX environments typically do. That means anything that binds an external C library (i.e., almost all useful Haskell packages) don't easily work on Windows. I'm not sure what the solution to this is...
Have you tried passing the --extra-include-dirs and --extra-lib-dirs arguments to 'cabal install'? On OS X, that's how I deal with the macports package manager which puts all library files under /opt/local. I've found the process pretty painless. -Judah