Hello Gregory and Philippos Gregory, methinks you are a unix user as "Cabal" gives you a carefree existence (the scare quotes do highlight that it's not poor Cabal's fault).
Philippos, the problems you are having aren't which cabal per-se but Haskell libraries that bind C libraries. On Windows I strongly recommend you install Cygwin, outside of the Microsoft toolchain (Visual Studio, C# etc.) any serious development on Windows really is troublesome without it, some development still is but that's another story. Installing Cygwin will pull in a huge amount of code first time round but after that it it manageable. Once you have Cygwin – here's how to install the pcre and readline bindings. Re-run the cygwin installer. For pcre you will need Devel/pcre and Libs/libpcre. For readline you will need Devel/readline and Lib/libreadlineN – I have both libreadline5 and libreadline6 installed, so clearly they can coexist. To build the Haskell bindings you want to be running Cygwin naturally. I'd make a directory in /usr/local tagged to the version of GHC I'm using eg Haskell_ghc_6_10_3 and copy the tar.gz's there (having a directory for a particular GHC version makes it easier to track which packages you are depending upon across GHC updates). Untar the packages with tar (some Windows archivers don't handle Unixed archives well) > tar xvfz readline-1.0.1.0.tar.gz > tar xvfz pcre-0.3.1.tar.gz At this point I'd edit the *.cabal files in each component – this is not 'the done thing', but both libraries need extra flags and as I have to compile them rarely I tend to forget the format (which appears to be Windows style full paths even though you are running Cygwin). Append this to the end of readline.cabal extra-lib-dirs: C:\cygwin\lib include-dirs: C:\cygwin\usr\include\readline C:\cygwin\usr\include Append this to the end of pcre-light.cabal extra-lib-dirs: C:\cygwin\lib include-dirs: C:\cygwin\usr\include Provide you have cygwin at the root of C: (which is very wise!), you should be able to build with the usual runhaskell Setup.lhs { configure | build | install | hadock } Best wishes Stephen _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe