[Haskell-cafe] Unix emulation

[Tillmann Rendel]

Felipe Lessa wrote:
> I take it that the problem is that libcurl is a C library with a
> Unix-like build system, and that is the problem that needs Cygwin,
> right?

One needs a compiler and libraries on the one hand, and a bunch of 
command-line tools on the other hand. On Windows, MinGW provides the 
former, while Cygwin provides a package manager to install the latter.

MinGW seems to be bundled with the Haskell platform on Windows, so that 
should be ok.

The Cygwin tools however have to be installed in addition to the Haskell 
platform, which is no big deal, but somewhat annoying. There are two 
steps to be done:

  (1) Install the core of Cygwin, and put it in the search path after
      the MinGW bundled with the Haskell platform.

  (2) If a cabal package fails to install because some tools (bash, perl,
      sed, make, ...) are missing, install the missing tool using the
      Cygwin package manager.

So a cabal package is better suited for installation on Windows if it 
does not depend on any command-line tools for building (or operation, of 
course). In practice, that means that a portable Setup.hs should contain 
Haskell code, not system calls to command-line tools.

   Tillmann