So I decided to try out the Haskell Platform instead of just installing
GHC directly. To be honest, I didn't really notice much difference,
except for the files being installed in a different place. But then,
initially HP ~= GHC; presumably the plan is for it to grow as time goes on.
Anyway, I'm sure you can all see where I'm going with this: Latest
Gtk2hs binary for Windows doesn't seem to like the latest HP installation.
A few things:
- It is unclear to be which Gtk2hs binaries require which GHC version.
Can we tabulate this information somewhere?
- It is also unclear to me which HP versions contain what stuff. The HP
page tells you all about the *current* HP version, and contains a link
to a raw directory listing for the older versions. (I especially love
the way the server truncates the filenames to just before where the
version number starts. Very helpful. :-D ) Can we get propper
descriptions for _all_ releases of HP? A table summarising the GHC
version and major packages/versions in each release would be nice.
- Any idea why the HP says "beta" on it?
- Apart from HP providing GHC 6.10.4 while Gtk2hs currently requires
6.10.3, it appears that the Gtk2hs installer package doesn't like GHC
being installed in a path with spaces. Apparently Gtk2hs has a bug
tracker. (I only just discovered this, so perhaps it needs to be more
prominent?) Somebody pointed out this bug 6 months ago. Somebody else
posted a potential fix a month ago. There is no visible activity from
the developers. (I emphasize "visible". Maybe they've seen this and
they're working on it, but there's no visible indication of activity.)
Gtk2hs is currently the *only* GUI binding that actually works on
Windows. It's always been slightly frustrating that every time a new
version of GHC comes out, us Windows users have to beg for somebody to
build a new binary. (Linux users, on the other hand, can just download
the sources and compile them with any compiler they like.) Presumably
going forward Gtk2hs will synchronise to the (less frequent) HP releases
rather than the individual GHC releases, so many this particular
frustration will be reduced. (It would be even less frustrating if
Gtk2hs was *in* HP, but I gather this won't ever happen.)
Of course, being able to actually build C bindings on Windows would be
even better, but this is apparently infeasible... :-( That being the
case, I'll settle for just a little bit more documentation.
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