Priorities for 6.10

[Don Stewart]

isaacdupree:
> Neil Mitchell wrote:
> >Hi
> >
> >> While I was away last week I jotted down a list of priorities for 6.10. 
> >> Some of these are in the bug tracker and some aren't, but I think it'd 
> >> be a good idea for us to first discuss what we really want to see 
> >> happen in the 6.10 time frame and then update the ticket database to 
> >> match.
> >
> >The thing that would be of biggest benefit to Windows developers is
> >the inclusion of cabal.exe (cabal-install) in the binary installer.
> >I'm not sure what build changes are required to allow this.
> 
> When manually installing GHC on Linux, it would also be quite convenient 
> to be able to have cabal-install available without manually download; 
> runghc Setup.hs {configure, build, install}; half a dozen packages from 
> Hackage.  (for me, it ended up being, in order of successful 
> installation after ghc-6.8.3: Cabal(1.4), zlib, mtl, parsec, network, 
> HTTP, cabal-install).  (Maybe if the extralibs tarball isn't frowned on 
> too much, it might be simplest just to include cabal-install in that?)

Some distros include extralibs with the base GHC system. This is
sensible in my view, as it means we have a platform for a large chunk
of hackage to work without too much effort. 

If extralibs was broad enough to ensure cabal-install worked out of the
box (we'd need to add HTTP and zlib) to it, that'd be a sweet spot.

Ian, what do you think? 

-- Don