How to install wxHaskell on Windows with MinGW/MSYS

Question

I was trying to install wxHaskell into a machine running Windows XP64, with MinGW/MSYS and wxWidget 3.0 built from source using gcc. I did:

cabal install wx

and got an error:

...
Configuring wxc-0.90.0.4...
setup.exe: wx-config: does not exist
Failed to install wxc-0.90.0.4
cabal.exe: Error: some packages failed to install:
wx-0.90.0.1 depends on wxc-0.90.0.4 which failed to install.
wxc-0.90.0.4 failed during the configure step. The exception was:
ExitFailure 1
wxcore-0.90.0.3 depends on wxc-0.90.0.4 which failed to install.

I had successfully used wxWidgets to write an sample application in C++ (gcc). So I do have a working wxWidget installation. And I have wx-config at:

$ which wx-config
/usr/local/bin/wx-config

The problem is that wx-config is a unix shell script, and cabal (called from MSYS) somehow refuses to recognize it even if it's on the system path. If I run wx-config in MSYS, I get something like:

$ wx-config --cxxflags
-I/usr/local/lib/wx/include/msw-unicode-3.0 -I/usr/local/include/wx-3.0 -D_LARGE
FILE_SOURCE=unknown -DWXUSINGDLL -D__WXMSW__ -mthreads

I have asked a question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21998763/how-to-convert-msys-shell-scripts-to-windows-exe-files to see if it's possible to convert the script to an exe, but no one responded with any solutions.

There is also a related question here, wxHaskell installation on windows , and another here wx 0.90.0.1 fails to install on Haskell Platform 2012.2.0.0 (WinXP). In fact, I couldn't found an answer that's confirmed to work. Also, the errors/settings here seem to be different, or the answers therein don't seem solve my problem. In particular, I downloaded an external wx-config.exe from https://sourceforge.net/projects/wxhaskell/files/wx-config-win/ per http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/WxHaskell/Windows. But running wx-config.exe can't recognize my wxWidget installation and always gives me an error about cannot find wxWidgets, like this:

$ ./wx-config.exe --prefix=/usr/local/
wx-config Error: wxWidgets hasn't been found installed at 'C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\loc
al'.

Please use the --prefix flag (as in wx-config --prefix=C:\wxWidgets)
or set the environment variable WXWIN (as in WXWIN=C:\wxWidgets)
to specify where is your installation of wxWidgets.

Any idea how to work around this issue?

Thanks,

-- Update --

@JP I tried:

C:\temp\wxdirect-0.90.0.1>runhaskell Setup configure --extra-lib-dirs=c:\MinGW\lib --extra-include-dirs=c:\MinGW\include --extra-include-dirs=c:\MinGW\msys\1.0\local\include
Configuring wxdirect-0.90.0.1...

and got

Setup: At least the following dependencies are missing:
containers >=0.2 && <0.5, strict -any

I tweaked wxdirect.cabal to bypass containers >=0.2 && <0.5, but can't get pass strict.

Answer 1

I've written a powershell script that automates the setup of MinGW and the downloading/building of wxWidgets in order to build wxHaskell for Windows 7.

https://github.com/cessationoftime/wxHaskell-Windows-Builder