[Haskell-cafe] 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!

[Sebastian Sylvan]

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From: "Duncan Coutts" <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>
Sent: Sunday, February 01, 2009 2:59 PM
To: "Don Stewart" <dons at galois.com>
Cc: <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!

> On Sat, 2009-01-31 at 14:02 -0800, Don Stewart wrote:
>
>> >    not really :) e.g. my output on a Windows Vista system with GHC
>> 6.10.1
>> >    cabal install sdl
>
>> >    Configuring SDL-0.5.4...
>> >    setup.exe: sh: runGenProcess: does not exist (No such file or 
>> > directory)
>
>> Isn't this missing C library dependencies, which cabal head now warns
>> about?
>
> No, it's about packages using configure scripts which require MSYS on
> Windows.
>
> In principle we should be able to notice this while doing the package
> dependency planning and report that we cannot install the package
> because it needs sh.exe.
>

I wonder *why* packages need sh though? Isn't cabal supposed to allow you to 
do that kind of scripting in Haskell rather than calling into 
platform-dependent shell scripts? Are there any specific reasons why people 
feel the need to use sh?
If the package is unix-only for other reasons (e.g. bindings to X or 
whatever) then it's obviously not a problem, but it appears to me that 
there's lots of packages that should be portable in principle that won't 
build on windows because it needs to run sh...