Malcolm,
Ok, tried that (with the patches and with the include-modifications). It seems to run into a problem as well (haven't had time to look into this yet, but just in case you recognise the symptoms):
hmake-config: Starting new config from scratch. cannot create /tmp/hmakeconfig.1748: permission denied
Yuk. Is the existence of a writable /tmp something I can't assume on Cygwin/Windows either?
The real joke is that I was doing the whole thing in /tmp/nhc.., so /tmp definitely existed and was writable, or I wouldn't even have been able to unpack the stuff, let alone compile anything. So there is something odd with that error message, which is why I asked whether the symptoms ring a bell. Any ideas?
grep: /cygdrive/c/ghc/ghc-5.02.2/bin/ghc: No such file or directory
Ah, yes I think I remember reading once that GHC/mingw32 does not have a driver script, only a directly executable binary. Hence, grepping through the script for configuration information (as hmake-config is attempting to do here) is no longer an option.
So it seems. And I've seen you trying to follow ghc's development here on numerous occasions. Given that you are all working to make Haskell a better platform, why do you have to guess each other's configuration info? Why not define the info everyone needs about each others implementations, and put that into a well known place (a show-config option to the compiler/interpreter, for instance). That would also come in handy for bug reports, and implementers would be free to change their code, as long as they still deliver the config data.
Unfortunately, I'm not aware of any other way to reliably get config info out of GHC.
Sadly, the difficulty of using GHC/mingw32 as a bootstrapping compiler seems to be increasing the more we delve into it. Perhaps it would be safest for us simply to recommend GHC/cygwin instead, and disallow the GHC/mingw32 route.
As long as the gcc-route still works, that should be less of a problem for those who want a ghc with everything stable, but without the fun of compiling it. We'll see. One step after the other. Cheers, Claus