[darcs-users] Cygwin status (was: Problems with ssh)

[Josef Svenningsson]

On Fri, 11 Feb 2005 12:20:05 -0800, Steven E. Harris <seh at panix.com> wrote:
> Juliusz Chroboczek <jch at pps.jussieu.fr> writes:
> 
> > or a Cygwin build of Darcs
> 
> What's the current status of getting darcs to build on Cygwin? The
> Wiki notes¹:
> 
> ,----
> | I couldn't get Darcs to compile under Cygwin. Instead, I use the
> | Windows executable along with a wrapper script that takes Cygwin
> | paths and converts them to Windows paths before passing them to
> | Darcs. (Note that Darcs will still use Windows paths when it does
> | stuff like save your most-recently-pulled repo path.)
> |
> | BTW, has anybody had success building from source on Cygwin?
> `----
> 
> Though I don't know haskell, I'd like to help get darcs building on
> Cygwin. Who else has tried recently?
> 
I scanned through the email archives and it seems that the status of
running ghc under cygwin isn't well-known here. Let me explain it.
ghc on windows ships with its own gcc. This gcc is a MinGW gcc which
is supposedly much easier to target than cygwin. So when one has
haskell code interfacing with c then the c code must also be compiled
with ghc:s gcc and linked with ghc. All this is possible to do under
cygwin, but the problem is that the resulting program is not a cygwin
program, it's a normal windows binary. If one wants to compile with
cygwins toolchain, and in particular its gcc, then one has to port ghc
to cygwin. This hasn't been tried in a while and I believe it would
require some real work to get it to work.

So, we're not going to see a cygwin darcs anytime soon. But the ghc
guys are very helpful people and would support any attempt to port ghc
to cygwin should anyone try it.

Cheers,

/Josef