Set up my Windows development environment. For future reference, I've installed:

  • haskell platform for windows
  • cygwin
  • gcc and a full C toolchain in cygwin
  • git from upstream (probably git-annex will use this)
  • git in cygwin (the other git was not visible inside cygwin)
  • vim in cygwin
  • vim from upstream, as the cygwin vim is not very pleasant to use
  • openssh in cygwin (seems to be missing a ssh server)
  • rsync in cygwin
  • Everything that cabal install git-annex is able to install successfully.
    This includes all the libraries needed to build regular git-annex, but not the webapp. Good start though.

Result basically feels like a linux system that can't decide which way slashes in paths go. :P I've never used Cygwin before (I last used a Windows machine in 2003 for that matter), and it's a fairly impressive hack.

Fixed up git-annex's configure program to run on Windows (or, at least, in Cygwin), and have started getting git-annex to build.

For now, I'm mostly stubbing out functions that use unix stuff. Gotten the first 44 of 300 source files to build this way.

Once I get it to build, if only with stubs, I'll have a good idea about all the things I need to find Windows equivilants of. Hopefully most of it will be provided by http://hackage.haskell.org/package/unix-compat-0.3.0.1.

So that's the plan. There is a possible shortcut, rather than doing a full port. It seems like it would probably not be too hard to rebuild ghc inside Cygwin, and the resulting ghc would probably have a full POSIX emulation layer going through cygwin. From ghc's documentation, it looks like that's how ghc used to be built at some point in the past, so it would probably not be too hard to build it that way. With such a cygwin ghc, git-annex would probably build with little or no changes. However, it would be a git-annex targeting Cygwin, and not really a native Windows port. So it'd see Cygwin's emulated POSIX filesystem paths, etc. That seems probably not ideal for most windows users.. but if I get really stuck I may go back and try this method.