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

[Don Stewart]

sebastian.sylvan:
> 
> 
> --------------------------------------------------
> From: "Don Stewart" <dons at galois.com>
> Sent: Saturday, January 31, 2009 8:35 PM
> To: "Andrew Coppin" <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
> Cc: <haskell-cafe at haskell.org>
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] 1,000 packages, so let's build a few!
> 
> >andrewcoppin:
> >>In celebration of Hackage reachin over 1,000 unique packages, I decided
> >>that I would re-visit the problem of attempting to build them on Windows.
> >>
> >>Ah yes, I already have the tarball for stream-fusion-0.1.1, but I see
> >>that the latest release is 0.1.2.1. (Unfortunately, there doesn't appear
> >>to be any way to determine what the difference is between the two
> >>versions...)
> >
> >the true way to install all of hackage is:
> >
> >   cabal install $(all my packages)
> >
> >where cabal install solves it all.
> 
> If that had actually worked it would be great.... I must say that my own 
> not-so-random sampling (basically "ooh that looks cool, let's try it") is 
> probably at a 20% success rate or so... It's great when it does work, but 
> it usually doesn't.
> 
> Usually it fails because some part of it tries to run unix shell scripts 
> (and I try to avoid things which seem like they're unix only, even though 
> they're no easy way of determining this, so these are packages that at 
> least to me seemed like they could be perfectly portable if not for 
> unix-specific installation procedures). 
> 

Windows people need to set up a windows at haskell.org to sort out their
packaging issues, like we have for debian, arch, gentoo, freebsd and
other distros.

Unless people take action to get things working well on their platform,
it will be slow going.

-- Don