Ingenious, finally it is possible at least with the help of those two tools cabal-dev and cab to build the threadscope executable on Windows linked against gtk+-bundle_2.22.1-20101227_win32 version, thanks again to their developers. [Note to myself] How I did, 1) as described in http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/gtk2hs/ticket/1203#comment:2 edited each Gtk2HsSetup.hs file 2) In a mingw+msys shell (tar is needed, how to install -> I strongly recommend using mingw-get-inst: http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/Automated%20MinGW%20Installer/mi... to mention at a first place, you can easily add things then with the bundled mingw-get command) did pushd /h/.homedir cabal-dev add-source /h/.homedir/gtk2hs-buildtools-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/glib-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/cairo-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/gio-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/glade-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/pango-0.12.0/ /h/.homedir/gtk-0.12.0/ cab install threadscope --sandbox=/h/.homedir/cabal-dev To be honest the last command I even run at the Windows cmd.exe prompt. This all means h:/.homedir/cabal-dev contains the formerly broken dependencies sources patched by my edits in the .cabal files. It is used (--sandbox parameter) as a first repository for building threadscope later on, the other dependencies are loaded remotely by demand. The reason for breaking with cabal I could see as mentioned above by Kazu, with: cab install threadscope -n threadscope needed different versions than the dependencies pre-installed with my former gtk2hs installation trial had. Cheers Daniel 2011/4/11 Kazu Yamamoto :

Hello,

...

thanks I wanted to mention that the "unknown symbol" error is very likely not related to the cab tool as the same error appears, when using the cabal - tool. I guess we can ignore it even in the context of my main question, sorry for being to verbose. What I found more interesting is, that cab doesn't try to re-install an installed package - already in the database too, as ghc-pkg output pretends - which is expected behaviour. The cabal system frontend obviously does trying to reinstall the package though. This seems like different model of reality...

This is not true.

cab install re-installs some packages if necessary, unfortunately. That's why I recommend to use "cab install -n".

--Kazu