[Haskell-cafe] cabal under windows (was Re: Haskell-Cafe Digest, Vol 51, Issue 180)

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-11-29 at 13:51 +1100, Tim Docker wrote:
> > Well I'd say none of the packages I've tried, build out of the box...
> 
> I'm not a windows developer, but....
> 
> Is it actually reasonable to expect any cabal packages that depend on
> external c libraries and headers to build out of the box on windows? How
> can cabal find out where those files are, without requiring a config
> file to be edited?

It's usually worse than that. The most likely situation is that the C
library and header files are not even installed. This is a big problem
for all packages that wrap C libs.

Sometimes the C code is sufficiently simple that one can just bundle it.
My zlib and bzlib packages on hackage do that and that's the only reason
they work on Windows. This is not a realistic solution for most other
binding packages.

Duncan