wagnerdm@seas.upenn.edu wrote:

Whooo, boy, I sure don't fancy explaining Msys/MinGW or Cygwin to a non-technical person and giving sufficiently detailed installation/usage instructions.

I still dislike the idea of needing to install MSYS, MinGW, Cygwin or similar tools to get anything remotely interesting from Hackage to build on Windows. Actually, I've been looking into the feasibility of building precompiled Windows binaries, Gtk2hs style, for all the "interesting" Haskell packages that are depended on my a lot of stuff. Currently I'm still struggling with convincing NSIS to do my diabolical bidding. (Jesus, I thought NSIS was supposed to make the job *easier*, not harder!) I haven't even got around to trying to make the awkward packages build so I can make installers.

Han Joosten wrote:

The haskell platform should take care of a lot of installation pain, specially for the non-technical users.

I note with dismay that there's a proposal to remove OpenGL from HP. Assuming this gets approved, that'll be one less library that you can use on Windows. I thought the idea of HP was to add new stuff, not remove existing stuff...

A new version is due to be release pretty soon (somewhere begin april). It has Mingw and Msys included, and also some pre-built binaries like cabal and haddock.

Plain GHC has included Haddock for a while now. It seems to me that including the entirity of MinGW and MSYS is overkill, but what do I know about the matter? I was however under the impression that to use Unix emulators such as these, you have to run everything from a seperate shell rather than the usual Windows shell.

It should be possible for a lot of packages to say 'cabal install <package>' at the command prompt to get your package up and running. I think that this is pretty cool, and most non-technical users should be able to get this to work without a lot of pain.

Having gone through the pain of setting up OpenSUSE and convincing it to install GHC, it was quite impressive to use. On Linux, it seems you can actually type "cabal install zlib" and reasonably expect it to actually work. Typically, it'll crash and say "install zlib-devel". You install that, rerun the command, and somehow it knows that you've installed the headers and where you've put them, and It Just Works(tm). Which is quite impressive. What isn't impressive is that if you ask to install something, and one of its dependencies fails to build, the failure message will get burried in amoungst several pages of other stuff. At the end it will say something like "package Foo failed to build. The build failure was: exit code 1." Yeah, that's really helpful. Fortunately, if you just rebuild, it will only try to rebuild the missing dependences, so you can usually catch the real error message scroll past (invariably some C headers not installed). I also have a personal wish that more tools would make use of coloured text output to make it easier to see what's happening in the sea of text scrolling past. (We even have a fully portable Haskell library for doing this - and it even builds cleanly on Windows!) My hope is that the more useful C libraries will get added to HP so that I can start using them. (E.g., I'd love to be able to do sound synthesis using Haskell, but there aren't any libraries for accessing the sound hardware...)