[Haskell-cafe] Windows Build Boxes (was Cabal failures...)

If some person or group of people is willing to administer and maintain windows build/testing boxes for the good of the Haskell community (perhaps even just for core infrastructure and an extended set of "blessed" libraries), I would be willing to contribute a decent sum to the procurement of these machines. I'm sure I am far from alone in this. It would be a very good use of our community resources to co-ordinate such efforts. Cheers, Gershom On 11/20/12 9:21 PM, Clark Gaebel wrote:

+1 to this. The friction of finding, setting up, and using Windows isn't even comparable to just sshing into another unix box and testing something quickly.

As a university student, I also find it relatively rare that I get to test on a Windows machine. My personal computer runs linux, my technical friends run linux or osx, and my non-technical ones run osx. Also, all the school servers that I have access to run either FreeBSD or Linux.

If I want to run something on linux system, I have about 40 different computers that I can ssh into and run code on.

If I want to run something on osx, I just have to call a friend and ask if they can turn on their computer and allow me to ssh in (to my own account, of course).

If I want to run something on Windows, I have to track down a friend (in person!), ask to borrow their computer for a few hours, get administrator access to install the Haskell Platform, get frustrated that HP hasn't been upgraded to 7.6, and give up.

It's just not practical, especially for the large amount of small (<500 LOC) packages on Hackage.

- Clark

On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 9:05 PM, Erik de Castro Lopo mailto:mle+hs@mega-nerd.com> wrote:

Albert Y. C. Lai wrote:

> Clearly, since >90% of computers have Windows, it should be trivial to > find one to test on, if a programmer wants to. Surely every programmer > is surrounded by Windows-using family and friends? (Perhaps to the > programmer's dismay, too, because the perpetual "I've got a virus again, > can you help?" is so annoying?) We are not talking about BeOS. > > Therefore, if programmers do not test on Windows, it is because they do > not want to.

I have been an open source contributor for over 15 years. All the general purpose machines in my house run Linux. My father's and my mother-in-law's computers also run Linux (easier for me to provide support). For testing software, I have a PowerPC machine and virtual machines running various versions of Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

What I don't have is a windows machine. I have, at numerous times, spent considerable amounts of time (and even real money for licenses) setting up (or rather trying to) windows in a VM and it is *always* considerably more work to set up, maintain and fix when something goes wrong. Setting up development tools is also a huge pain in the ass. And sooner or later they fail in some way I can't fix and I have to start again. Often its not worth the effort.

At my day job we have on-demand windows VMs, but I am not officially allowed (nor do I intend to start) to use those resources for my open source work.

So is it difficult for an open source contributor to test on windows? Hell yes! You have no idea how hard windows is in comparison to say FreeBSD. Even Apple's OS X is easier than windows, because I have friends who can give me SSH access to their machines.

Erik -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Erik de Castro Lopo http://www.mega-nerd.com/

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