David Roundy wrote:
On Wed, May 14, 2008 at 08:37:53PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
Andrew Coppin wrote:
I've recently reinstalled Windows, so I decided to go download the latest Darcs and set that up. Now it's complaining that I don't have curl or wget. (Never used to do that before.) The WindowsConfiguration file doesn't mention anything about it. [And the link back to the Darcs wiki is 404 by the way. "darcs.net" rather than "wiki.darcs.net". Nice touch...] Presumably this change is new in Darcs 2. I don't recall seeing anything about it when I read the announcement, and I'm now searching the wiki and I still don't see anything about it.

Presumably I just need to discover a Windows binary for wget and put it in my search path somewhere? Would be nice if this were documented... Darcs used to just work by itself without any additional tools.

It's just that the guy who built the windows binary didn't have libcurl
installed.  Since there don't seem to be many windows developers, we have
to live with those few people willing to compile darcs on windows...

Well, it seems that simply adding wget.exe to my search path did in fact fix the issue. It hasn't hard to find with Google, but a small note to that effect somewhere in the documentation would be quite nice.

Seriously, you have literally *no idea* how much trouble I've just had trying to achieve the simple task of getting Leksah to work. Every imaginable thing has gone wrong. Each impediment is fairly trivial in itself, but the sheer volume of them is... straining my patience!

- Darcs now needs wget in order to work. [Easy to fix once you work out how.] - Leksah needs Gtk2hs, but I have GHC 6.8.2. [Thank the Maker for gname - I've have never found the URL for the unofficial Gtk2hs build to fix this!] - Leksah needs something called "binary". [Once you figure out that that's a package and you're supposed to get it from Hackage, it's quite easy to find. Figuring out what to do with a tarball on Windows isn't that amusing. However, for once, Cabal did actually build and install it without issue.] - When I try to install Leksah, it complains that a PNG file doesn't exist. [My guess is the author's Darcs repo contains it, but they forgot to tell Darcs.] So I _manually edit_ the Cabal file. [Eeek!] Obviously Cabal now makes me reconfigure and rebuild, but the program now installs just fine. - Gee, now I wonder *where* exactly Cabal installed it? Oh well, it seems to have put the binary in my search path anyway - that's a nice touch. Now, let's see what this IDE actually looks li-- oh you have GOT to be KIDDING me! It can't find the right GTK DLL?!?

By now, I've been trying to "try out Leksah" for about an hour. As you can see, each problem is pretty small [although the "manually edit Cabal file" bit was scary]. However, add together enough small problems and you end up with a very frustrating experience. When it takes you 10 minutes or so to fix each problem, 6 small problems = 1 hour of your life. It adds up rather fast. :-(

At this point, my best guess is that the unofficial Gtk2hs binary is broken somehow. [Although I don't recall hearing anybody yelling about it...] Maybe tomorrow I'll try again on my other box that has an older GHC on it and see how that goes. For tonight, I'm just too frustrated to continue.

[I hope nobody takes my frustration *too* seriously. I'm just a little bit exasperated right now. I'll get over it. By tomorrow, this will probably seem very amusing... but right now it's quite late, and I'm sleepy.]

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