Compiling the haskell module on win32 / cygwin

Question

I am trying to compile Network.HTTP ( http://hackage.haskell.org/package/network ) on win32 / cygwin. However, it does not work with the following message:

Setup.hs: Missing dependency on a foreign library: * Missing (or bad) header file: HsNet.h This problem can usually be solved by installing the system package that provides this library (you may need the "-dev" version). If the library is already installed but in a non-standard location then you can use the flags --extra-include-dirs= and --extra-lib-dirs= to specify where it is. If the header file does exist, it may contain errors that are caught by the C compiler at the preprocessing stage. In this case you can re-run configure with the verbosity flag -v3 to see the error messages. 

Undoubtedly, this does not give more clues. HsNet.h includes sys / uio.h, which, in fact, should not be included, and should be configured correctly.

Answer 1

Do not use cygwin, instead follow Johan Tibells way

MSYS installation

 Install the latest Haskell Platform. Use the default settings. Download version 1.0.11 of MSYS. You'll need the following files: MSYS-1.0.11.exe msysDTK-1.0.1.exe msysCORE-1.0.11-bin.tar.gz The files are all hosted on haskell.org as they're quite hard to find in the official MinGW/MSYS repo. Run MSYS-1.0.11.exe followed by msysDTK-1.0.1.exe. The former asks you if you want to run a normalization step. You can skip that. Unpack msysCORE-1.0.11-bin.tar.gz into C:\msys\1.0. Note that you can't do that using an MSYS shell, because you can't overwrite the files in use, so make a copy of C:\msys\1.0, unpack it there, and then rename the copy back to C:\msys\1.0. Add C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\VERSION\mingw\bin to your PATH. This is neccesary if you ever want to build packages that use a configure script, like network, as configure scripts need access to a C compiler. 

These steps are what Tibell uses to compile the Network for win package, and I used it myself several times on most haskell releases.

Answer 2

You can create a network on win32 / cygwin. And the above steps, although helpful (from Jonke), might not be necessary.

When completing the configuration step, specify

 runghc Setup.hs configure --configure-option="--build=mingw32" 

In order for the library to be configured for mingw32, otherwise you will get a link or "undefined links" if you try to link or use a network library.

Answer 3

This coupled with @Yogesh Sajanikar's answer made it work for me (on win64 / cygwin):

• Make sure gcc in your path is not Mingw / Cygwin, but C: \ GHC \ GHC-6.12.1 \ MinGW \ Bin \ gcc.exe

(Run

 export PATH="/cygdrive/.../ghc-7.8.2/mingw/bin:$PATH" 

before running cabal install network in Cygwin shell)