There still exists some bugs in Cabal when it is used under Windows. - The platform dependent places in the code are marked with #ifdef mingw32_TARGET_OS but this macro is never defined ever under Windows. You must add -Dmingw32_TARGET_OS to the command line while building setup.exe and also add -Dmingw32_TARGET_OS to options-ghc field in Setup.description. - When Cabal is used to build library package then it fails to find ar.exe in the path. This isn't a problem when in the build is run from cygwin or mingw environment but is painful on plain Command prompt. - The package uses (getEnv "HOME") to get the path to home directory. The variable isn't present in plain Command prompt under Windows. - The default installation prefix under Windows is "C:\Program Files" but it is known that some times GHC doesn't work very well with paths which have spaces. I don't know whether this can be fixed or this depends from gcc and ld Each of these bugs have many solutions. From the message: Log: Define <arch>_TARGET_ARCH and <os>_TARGET_OS by default when CPP'ing. This avoids the main reason for needing to #include config.h into Haskell source, so most files that previously just #include "config.h" can now #if __GLASGOW_HASKELL__ < 603 #include "config.h" #endif from cvs-ghc@haskell.org it looks like the first bug is already solved for GHC but I don't know whether this will be adopted from other implementations too. Most of platform dependent code deals with filepaths and .exe .so/.dll extensions. Similar code already exists in many other tools in fptools repository. Maybe it is a time to collect such code in the standard library. The easiest way to fix second bug is to distribute ar.exe with GHC much like it already comes with gcc and ld. GHC can automatically invoke ar.exe when the --make option is given and the source doesn't provide Main.main. To fix third bug I tried to use SHGetFolderPathAndSubDir function to retrieve the "Application Data" folder for current user. This is: "C:\Documents and Settings\kr_angelov\Application Data" on my PC. The trouble here is that to do that I need to add shell32 to extra-libs field in package description. I don't have a way to preprocess Setup.description so I can't add shell32 conditionally. I would like to have a collection of functions like: getCurrentDirectory getAppUserDataDirectory getHomeDirectory in the System.Directory module. This can make some applications more portable. I would like to hear other suggestions to find the best way to make Cabal working under Windows. Cheers, Krasimir __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers! http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail