We're currently in the midst of a transition when it comes to
Cygwin, and it Isn't Right Yet.
Difficulties have been
a) (minor) it's tiresome to have to install cygwin just to use ghc
b) (much worse) if GHC was built with a different version of
cygwin than you have installed, it crashes in wierd ways
Under (b) there was a phase recently in which the current cygwin/mingwin
toolset simply contained fatal bugs in the I/O code. But regardless,
interfaces change and version skew does seem to matter.
Our goal is:
You should be able to install and run GHC
*regardless* whether or not you have Cygwin, or mingwin,
or whatever,
*and regardless* of what version you have
That is, GHC simply transforms Foo.hs into Foo.exe, without relying
on installed cygwin-ery.
One route to that was to ship with cygwin binaries, but that gives the
problem
you describe. (It appears to be impossible to build a binary that
links with
a specific DLL, if there's another DLL with the same name on the system;
we hadn't realised that at first.) So now we plan to ship with mingwin
binaries
that don't rely on any cygwin1.dll
This is a long way of saying:
a) this is right at the top of the must-do list
b) wait for the GHC5 release for win32, which will
I desperately hope, have the property I mention above.
Simon
| -----Original Message-----
| From: Antony Courtney [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
| Sent: 21 May 2001 19:51
| To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
| Subject: Cygwin and GHC on Windows
|
|
| Can someone explain to me why:
|
| (1) The GHC installation instructions state that you should
| install Cygwin before installing GHC on Windows,
|
| but
|
| (2) GHC seems to ship with its own versions of many of the
| Cygwin utilities (including perl and the Cygwin dll) ?
|
| On my Windows 2000 machine, this causes problems. When I
| attempt to invoke ghc, I get the error:
|
| $ ghc Main.hs
| c:\ghc\ghc-4.08.2\bin\perl.exe: *** conflicting versions of
| cygwin1.dll detected. Use only the most recent version.
|
| I hand-edited the first line of c:\ghc\ghc-4.08.2\bin\ghc
| driver script to be
|
| #!/usr/bin/perl
|
| instead of
| #!c:/ghc/ghc-4.08.2/bin/perl
|
| and that seemed to fix things. But I still find this rather
| unnerving.
|
| As a Cygwin user of many years, might I ask: Why does ghc
| ship with its own versions of Cygwin utilities? I could
| understand this during the awkward changeover period from
| Cygwin B19 to Cygwin 1.1 a year or so ago, but
| (thankfully) things have stabilized considerably since then.
| Nowadays, I think shipping with your own versions of the
| cygwin utilities will just lead to incompatibilities and
| version skew such as I observed above.
|
| And, I would think that it is better to require users who
| don't have Cygwin installed to go through the (painless)
| process of installing Cygwin than it is to fail outright for
| those of us who already have Cygwin.
|
| -antony
|
| --
| Antony Courtney
| Grad. Student, Dept. of Computer Science, Yale University
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.apocalypse.org/pub/u/antony
|
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