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From: "Duncan Coutts"
On Sat, 2009-01-31 at 14:02 -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
not really :) e.g. my output on a Windows Vista system with GHC 6.10.1 cabal install sdl
Configuring SDL-0.5.4... setup.exe: sh: runGenProcess: does not exist (No such file or directory)
Isn't this missing C library dependencies, which cabal head now warns about?
No, it's about packages using configure scripts which require MSYS on Windows.
In principle we should be able to notice this while doing the package dependency planning and report that we cannot install the package because it needs sh.exe.
I wonder *why* packages need sh though? Isn't cabal supposed to allow you to do that kind of scripting in Haskell rather than calling into platform-dependent shell scripts? Are there any specific reasons why people feel the need to use sh? If the package is unix-only for other reasons (e.g. bindings to X or whatever) then it's obviously not a problem, but it appears to me that there's lots of packages that should be portable in principle that won't build on windows because it needs to run sh...