[Haskell-cafe] RFC: removing “alternative installation methods” from haskell.org (or finding them owners)

[Ivan Perez]

On Sun, 3 Apr 2022 at 14:11, Tom Ellis <
tom-lists-haskell-cafe-2017 at jaguarpaw.co.uk> wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 03, 2022 at 07:57:47PM +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
> > On 03/04/2022 19.34, Tom Ellis wrote:

It is not doing
> right by the community to publish information that we cannot support
> or verify.
>

A key factor with respect to the problem I am seeing at large, over large
periods of time, is that the Haskell community has a very, very strong
tendency to start new efforts instead of contributing to existing ones. We
have witnessed it in the appearance of installation tools, language
extensions, competing libraries, efforts to control/guide the discourse
regarding key parts of the Haskell infrastructure, you name it. There were
excellent, excellent methods to install and setup haskell quickly that did
not warrant the creation of yet more methods. And yet, those have been
created, standard installation methods abandoned, and here we are. The
feeling I have is that we are going around in circles.

That has left a lot of people burned out. What was once a joy (programming
in Haskell) has become, for many, a drain, and they have abandoned their
work when a competing effort was hyped up. I'm sure you can all identify
Haskellers who have left and/or taken very long breaks due to burn out.

The attitude we should have with respect to these efforts is not "can we
focus on advertising what is maintained", but rather "what is the story we
would like to tell, about the language, and the community".

I would like the community to avoid giving a few people control over the
conversation. I would like technical merit to trump over hype. And there's
a lot of technical merit in solutions outside ghcup/stack that deserve
attention and recognition. And the fact that not all of us agree indicates
that, as a community, we should recognize those efforts and not erase them.

To achieve that effect, it's enough to keep them at the bottom of the page,
and anyone who determines that the effort is maintained should be welcome
to move it to the top.

Ivan
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