tar should be installed before the installation of HLS, this should be an additional instruction of HLS installation

[leo-mao]

Your environment

Win8.1 Pro version 6.3 9600 64bit

Steps to reproduce

follow the official instruction to install HLS

cd ..
git clone https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server --recurse-submodules
cd haskell-language-server
stack install.hs hls-8.10.3

Expected behaviour

Installation should be done flawlessly.

Actual behaviour

2021-01-31 12:43:58.193440: [debug] Process finished in 108ms: C:\Program Files\Git\cmd\git.EXE -c core.autocrlf=false archive -o C:\Users\Admin\AppData\Local\Temp\with-repo-archive22888\foo.tar HEAD
2021-01-31 12:43:58.499660: [error] Executable named tar not found on path: [".",.......]

How to fix it

since tar is only available under *nix, cygwin have to be installed aforehand.

1. install cygwin
2. run the stack install.hs hls in cygwin terminal, or add C:\cygwin64\bin to system PATH and run the command in cmd

btw. if you encounter "commitAndReleaseBuffer: invalid argument (invalid character)" issue in later installation, you should change your terminal encoding to utf8

[fendor]

I thought stack would be enough, no cygwin required? Doesn't it install msys2 into a private location?

[fendor]

Seems related: commercialhaskell/stack#5249

[leo-mao]

Seems related: commercialhaskell/stack#5249

Seems that whilst windows 10 comes with tar windows 7 does not

okay, in win 10 will this issue not occur, i.e. sole stack could be enough, whilst in win7&8.1 is not the case.

[fendor]

Does it work to execute stack exec -- pacman -S tar?

From: https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/developing_on_windows/

[leo-mao]

Does it work to execute stack exec -- pacman -S tar?

From: https://docs.haskellstack.org/en/stable/developing_on_windows/

It does surprise me that stack even support pacman, and stack exec -- pacman -S tar works, and this could be another workaround for this issue.

[ndmitchell]

Tar isn't only available on Cygwin - in fact, if you want to get a copy of Tar, there is BSD Tar which provides native Windows binaries which I use. I think we might want to be careful about using tar, but installing Cygwin is a very big hammer to try that.

What is actually using tar? Is it Stack itself? Or are we spawning tar directly?

[leo-mao]

Tar isn't only available on Cygwin - in fact, if you want to get a copy of Tar, there is BSD Tar which provides native Windows binaries which I use. I think we might want to be careful about using tar, but installing Cygwin is a very big hammer to try that.

Thanks for your advice, I choose Cygwin is because that I have less experience with cmd and Cygwin is recommanded by stackoverflow, which might also offer other essential but potentially missing binaries.

What is actually using tar? Is it Stack itself? Or are we spawning tar directly?

As I provided in issue description, tar is needed by git archive.

[ndmitchell]

I personally use https://sourceforge.net/projects/unxutils/. MingW is also a good option. Cygwin is usually a worse option than MingW.

Who is running git archive? Us or stack? If it's us, we should stop, and just download the right archive from GitHub directly. If it's stack, we should raise the issue with them, as they should ensure the right tools are installed.