[Haskell-cafe] ANN: "Real World Haskell", now shipping

[Judah Jacobson]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:53 AM, Andrew Coppin
<andrewcoppin at btinternet.com> wrote:
> Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
>>
>> On 2008 Dec 2, at 14:44, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>>>
>>> Regardless, it has been my general experience that almost everything
>>> obtained from Hackage fails miserably to compile under Windows. (IIRC, one
>>> package even used a Bash script as part of the build process!) I haven't
>>> seen similar problems on Linux. (But I don't use Linux very often.) About
>>> the worst problem there was Gtk2hs being confused about some Autoconfig
>>> stuff or something...
>>
>>
>> Many packages assume you have the msys / mingw stuff installed on Windows
>> (if they work at all; those of us who don't develop on Windows wouldn't
>> really know how to go about being compatible).
>>
>
> According to the Cabal experts, the issue is that Windows doesn't have a
> "standard" place for keeping header files like the various POSIX
> environments typically do. That means anything that binds an external C
> library (i.e., almost all useful Haskell packages) don't easily work on
> Windows. I'm not sure what the solution to this is...

Have you tried passing the --extra-include-dirs and --extra-lib-dirs
arguments to 'cabal install'?  On OS X, that's how I deal with the
macports package manager which puts all library files under
/opt/local.  I've found the process pretty painless.

-Judah