Help from windows developers please? Re: [darcs-devel] darcs patch: Start Compat.hs...

Peter Strand peter at zarquon.se
Wed Aug 3 12:24:25 PDT 2005


David Roundy wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 02, 2005 at 11:39:47PM +0200, Peter Strand wrote:
>>David Roundy wrote:
>>>Hi all,
>>>It'd be really nice if we could have a developer with windows look over
>>>these patches, see what works, what doesn't, and generally give feedback.
>>>I'm happy to review Ian's patches, but in this case I'm not particularly
>>>competent to do so.  It'd be great if we had a windows developer who was
>>>willing to work with Ian on these changes.

>>I pulled Ian's patches and got it to compile and run on windows, by 
>>implementing parts of System.Posix.{Files,IO} and RawMode.hsc. Haven't 
>>tested it very much yet, but I can't see any fundamental problems with 
>>the change.

> Will you be willing to be in charge of making it work with windows? Or does
> someone else want to volunteer for that job?

Sure, it's not that much work, mostly basic file handling.

> There's also the question of to what extent we really want to achieve
> portability by emulating System.Posix under windows.  To me it would feel
> cleaner to write our own portable file-handling interface that is
> implemented for each system (probably calling System.Posix on posix
> systems, and perhaps using the ffi on windows).

Well, I would normally agree. But in this case I think it's easiest to 
use System.Posix as such a portability layer since it's not that 
different from the windows stuff and some of it is already there.
System.Posix.Types is available on windows, and so is 
System.Posix.Internals, which contains most of what we need in a "raw" 
form (ffi definitions and a couple of helper functions).

I'm only speculating now but I wouldn't be too surprised if most of 
System.Posix will be available on windows not too far in the future 
(like the "unix" module in ocaml). At least the parts which aren't too 
unix-specific (like fork and signals).



/Peter




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