+</sect3>
+
+<sect3 id="ghc-cygwin"><title>Cygwin and MSYS</title>
+
+<para>You can't use the MinGW to <emphasis>build</emphasis> GHC, because MinGW doesn't have a shell,
+or the standard Unix commands such as <command>mv</command>, <command>rm</command>,
+<command>ls</command>, nor build-system stuff such as <command>make</command> and <command>cvs</command>.
+For that, there are two choices: <ulink url="http://www.cygwin.com">Cygwin</ulink>
+and <ulink url="http://www.mingw.org/msys.shtml">MSYS</ulink>:
+
+<itemizedlist>
+<listitem><para>
+MSYS is a fork of the Cygwin tree, so they
+are fundamentally similar. However, MSYS is by design much smaller and simpler. Access to the file system goes
+through fewer layers, so MSYS is quite a bit faster too.
+</para></listitem>
+
+<listitem><para>
+Cygwin comes with compilation tools (<command>gcc</command>, <command>ld</command> and so on), which
+compile code that has access to all of Posix. The price is that the executables must be
+dynamically linked with the Cygwin DLL, so that <emphasis>you cannot run a Cywin-compiled program on a machine
+that doesn't have Cygwin</emphasis>. Worse, Cygwin is a moving target. The name of the main DLL, <literal>cygwin1.dll</literal>
+does not change, but the implementation certainly does. Even the interfaces to functions
+it exports seem to change occasionally. </para>
+
+<para>In contrast, MSYS provides no compilation tools; it relies instead on the MinGW tools. These
+compile binaries that run with no DLL support, on any Win32 system.
+However, MSYS does come with all the make-system tools, such as <command>make</command>, <command>autoconf</command>,
+<command>cvs</command>, <command>ssh</command> etc. To get these, you have to download the
+MsysDTK (Developer Tool Kit) package, as well as the base MSYS package.
+</para>
+<para>MSYS does have a DLL, but it's only used by MSYS commands (<command>sh</command>, <command>rm</command>,
+<command>ssh</command> and so on),
+not by programs compiled under MSYS.
+</para></listitem>
+
+</itemizedlist>