of Cabal's functionality like finding compilers and such. I was under the impression that it didn't work on Windows. From another quick look at the website, it looks like that's right. Does anybody happen to know otherwise?
It actually does. I've managed to compile it. You have one major problem when trying to install nix from source on windows: You need another lex/ bison version. I've already proposed adding the parser files to the svn repository so that this problem would be gone. I didn't check that this already has happened. GHC is not yet supported on windows. But adding the binary installer shouldn't be hard. On windows there are some minor quirks with symlinks. And you need NTFS (fat32 doesn't work).. each package description (it's called derivation) has an property builder. This is a script which sources another basch script defining default targets (unpack, build, ...). But you can specify any other executable to do the build task. Beeing totally pure means also that you have to download a lot of packages more than once (linux header files glibc etc ...) Because nix won't use the ones beeing installed by your system. This doesn't matter as you can use NixOs. I think more than one developper is using NixOS as main os. But you will have to hack a lot to get what you already have.. (I think. I haven't tried yet).. I'm currently working on moving all hackagedb packages to nix with automatic dependency resolving. I already have list of package descriptions from the hackage site which looks roughly like this (thus each package chooses which dependencies it needs by selector functions filtering the whole hackage package list by itself..) <start list> ({ cabaldeps=[ ({descr="base"; filter_func=d : ("base" == d.id.name);}) ({descr="parsec"; filter_func=d : ("parsec" == d.id.name);}) ({descr="mtl"; filter_func=d : ("mtl" == d.id.name);}) ({descr="template-haskell"; filter_func=d : ("template_haskell" == d.id.name);}) ]; name="harpy"; src="http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/harpy/0.2/harpy-0.2.tar.gz"; version=[(0) (2) ]; }) .... <end list> The cool thing: You can not only automatically download/ compile dependencies but also distribute the packages and update by automatically generated binary diffs (you should read the nix manual to get more accurate information because I still feel like a noob). I'll post another message to the nix dev list so that the main developpers can give a more accurate status report if they wish. Marc Weber