| Version 19 (modified by simonmar, 3 years ago) |
|---|
Setting up a Windows system for building GHC
Installing the following will get you a working build environment with MSYS (alternatively, install Cygwin). For your convenience we've cached a working set of build tools that you can download. Note: we recommend not installing anything in a directory that contains spaces.
- First install a recent stable version of GHC.
- Install MinGW:
- Install MSYS:
- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/MSYS-1.0.11.exe (originally from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ under "MSYS Base System")
- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/msysDTK-1.0.1.exe (originally from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ under "MSYS Supplementary Tools")
- http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/msysCORE-1.0.11-bin.tar.gz (originally from http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/files/ under "MSYS Base System") (this is a tar file, which you have to unpack in c:/msys/1.0, or wherever you installed MSYS. 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).
- Install Python (version 2.6.2 is a good choice. 2.6.1 causes a problem with the test suite, and we don't support 3.x at this time).
The next three are just zip files, you can unpack them wherever you like, but you need to ensure that the programs can be found on your PATH. I usually put all these in c:/tools (NB. don't put them anywhere in c:/msys, that's special).
- Install Happy: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/happy-1.17.zip
- Install Alex: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/alex-2.2.zip
- Install Darcs: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/tools/Win32/darcs.zip (or you may fare better with a newer release from http://wiki.darcs.net/Binaries)
Now set your PATH. We recommend doing this by creating a file .profile in your home directory (by default c:/msys/1.0/home/<username>). The contents of your .profile should be something like this:
PATH=/c/mingw/bin:/c/ghc/ghc-6.10.1/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/c/tools:/c/Python26:/c/windows/system32
Modify the above according to where you installed things, and change the GHC version appropriately.
Disable realtime virus-scanning for your build
Realtime virus scanners are prone to causing weird build failures, typically "permission denied" errors that go away when the build is restarted. The best way to avoid these problems is to exclude the directory containing your GHC build from realtime virus scanning, if your scanner supports excluding particular directories. You probably also want to exclude directories in which temporary files are stored, which by default is C:/Users/<user>/Local Settings/Temp on Windows Vista and later, C:/Documents and Settings/<user>/Local Settings/Temp on Windows XP and older, or C:/Temp.
Building documentation on Windows
Building GHC's documentation is optional, but in order to build it in Windows you must currently use Cygwin (there isn't a working DocBook toolchain on MSYS as far as we know).
In the Cygwin installer, just install the complete Doc category. You may have to help configure a little bit: Set the environment variables XmllintCmd and XsltprocCmd to the paths of the Cygwin executables xmllint and xsltproc, respectively, and set fp_cv_dir_docbook_xsl to the path of the directory where the XSL stylesheets are installed, e.g. c:/cygwin/usr/share/docbook-xsl.
If you want to build HTML Help, you have to install the HTML Help SDK, too, and make sure that hhc is in your PATH.
