Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANN: "Real World Haskell", now shipping

Jason Dusek wrote:

Andrew Coppin wrote:

...

...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.)

I try very hard to make my programs work on Windows; and indeed, one of things I appreciate about Haskell is how easy it is to create binaries and packages that are cross platform.

Certainly the one or two "pure Haskell" packages out there (e.g., PureMD5) seem to build without issue. The trouble is that almost all useful Haskell packages are bindings to C libraries, and that varies by platform. :-(

However, the only time I actually use Windows is to build and test my Haskell packages. Most of the people on this list -- and I wager, most people on the mailing lists for any open source programming language -- are working on a NIXalike; we can work with bug reports, but we can't very well be the fabled "many eyeballs" on a platform we don't use. Ask not what your Haskell can do for you, but rather what you can do for your Haskell :)

As I say, last time I tried this, I'd just failed to build half a dozen other interesting packages, so by the time I'd got to trying to get database access working, I was frustrated to the point of giving up. (The IRC channel is great - but only if the people you need to speak to happen to be there at the exact moment when you ask your question. Apparently I'm in a different timezone to everybody else.)

...

About the worst problem there was Gtk2hs being confused about some Autoconfig stuff or something...

Well, what else would a package built with GNU toolchain be confused about? Is there some miraculous language and package system for it where compiling libraries made with autotools is just a snap on Windows?

No no - I meant the worst problem _on Linux_ was Gtk2hs getting confused. (It built OK on OpenSuSE, but appears not to like Ubuntu very much.)