On Nov 22, 2007 9:39 PM, Andrew Coppin
Editing the cabal config file is necessary so that the SDL include files and libs can be found.
...because Windows uses DLLs instead of [whatever it is that Unix does]?
The reason is that on Unix, there are standard location for header files and libraries. On windows, they can be anywhere, and in the case of SDL, they are inside the directory where SDL was installed.
Out of curiosity, is there a reason I'm trying to compile the code myself in the first place? Is it just because that's "the Unix way", or is there some deep reason why we can't just download prebuilt binaries?
I am in favour of the idea of providing prebuilt binaries. Do you think something like the gtk2hs windows installer would be good?
Gtk2hs is certainly drop-dead easy to install, no doubt about that. (Modulo some tricky path fiddling if you install Glade seperately as well... but that's no fault of the Haskell package.)
Personally, given how tricky it generally is to build *most* things from source code (you have to have all the right tools to do it), I'd prefer to see *all* packages available in binary form. However, I guess the number of packages and possible target platforms makes this prohibitive...
On GNU/Linux it is usually not tricky at all to build things from source, and a lot of people prefer it over installing binaries. I do agree that binary packages should be available for windows.