[nhc-bugs] Building nhc98 on Windows 2000

[Sigbjorn Finne]

"C.Reinke" <C.Reinke@ukc.ac.uk> writes:
> > 
> > Assembler messages:
> > FATAL: Can't create \
> > \tmp\nhc98-1.12\targets\ix86-CYGWIN_NT-5.0\obj\hmake\QSort.o
> > 
> > This is a known 'usability bug' with GHC - it doesn't check that
> > the directory portion of the '-o' file exists, but just merrily
> > hands it off to the assembler, which barfs with the above
> > unfriendly message.
> > 
> > So, for whatever reason, that /tmp/... directory doesn't exist.
> 
> Question: which assembler is being called there?
> 

The one GHC comes with, i.e., one that's from the mingw distribution
(=> is itself free of cygwin.)

> In a standalone GHC, that can't be the cygwin assembler, so, unless
> the call is routed via the cygwin shell, the assembler is unlikely
> to know about cygwin's file system.
> 

Quite so.

> When I encountered that problem, a simple fix was to add the
> necessary prefix to turn the cygwin path into a native path:
> 
>   c:/cygwin/tmp/nhc...
> 
> neither GHC nor cygwin have trouble with that path, and the
> assembler was happy as well.
> 

That'll work, or just create a toplevel /tmp -- I always seem to end
up doing so.

So, provided nhc98 can avoid depending on 'posix', don't just give up
on using GHC for compiling nhc98 under win32 just yet.

--sigbjorn