GHC hacking in Windows -> too much pain

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Esa,

> For some weeks I've tried many times to get ghc builds going,
> with the idea I could help with Windows bugs.  But I find simply
> building ghc in my non-static configuration Windows machine is
> simply too frustrating.

My experience building the libraries for Hugs using Windows (in
particular Mingw) are also frustrating. The problem is that these are
clearly Unix/Linux tools, which (with luck and hacks) also work on
Windows to some degree. I have submitted one patch to GHC, and for
that I borrowed my friends Linux box. If I was able to easily build
GHC from source on Windows, I would be substantially more likely to
contribute code.

We had similar problems in Yhc, so decided to move to Scons to have a
properly cross platform and consistent build system. My only advice
from that experiment is _never_ use Scons. Our current plan is to move
to a hand-rolled Haskell build system, but we still have no idea how
that should work.

In summary, configure/make is currently the best option, but is also
hopeless compared to the beauty of Haskell we are all used to.

Thanks

Neil