[nhc-bugs] problems installing nhc98-1.04 on cygwin

[Malcolm Wallace]

| > Ok, I think you have persuaded us to use one different suffix.
| > We are currently thinking of changing 't' (for time profiling) to 'z'
| > in your honour.  (For 'zeit', or perhaps for your middle name Claus?).
| 
| I'm not aware of having a middle name (a certain cs-support team at 
| an unnamed English university was once unable to cope with this idea
| and decided to add a z to my then-email-address;-).

Aha.  I was always puzzled by that.

| But as we use time
| profiling when our programs seem to go to sleep (zzzz...), that suffix
| seems appropriate.

I have not heard any objections fro elsewhere, so I think we'll settle on z.

| - The tar-file still seems (not) to contain a spurious file:
|   tar: nhc98-1.04/src/prelude/Numeric/Makefile?: Could not create file: 

Ok, it seems I still failed to remove this spurious `Makefile?' from
the tree I use to prepare the distribution.  It is now removed,
and future distribution packages will not contain it.

| - There seems to be a disagreement about the order in which libraries
|   are processed during linking.
|     ....
|   In other words, adding -lncurses as *the very first flag* in a
|   call to gcc ain't going to help anyone. In src/tracer/hat/Makefile:
|       LINKFLAGS= -lncurses -g

Yes, I guess this looks a little strange - but it works here.  Are you
saying it doesn't work in Cygwin?  Nevertheless, you are right, we ought
to change it.

| And finally, a question:
| 
| I was under the impression that nhc supported addFinalizer, but I can't
| seem to find it anywhere. Is it supported, and if so, where do I find it?

We do not support any operation called addFinalizer.  However, we
do have

     FFI.newForeignObj  :: FFI.Addr -> IO () -> IO FFI.ForeignObj

Is this sufficient for your purposes?

Regards,
    Malcolm