Improving the "Get Haskell Experience"

[Heinrich Apfelmus]

Mark Lentczner wrote:
> *tl;dr: We'd like to incorporate stack into Haskell Platform, and stop
> shipping pre-built packages, so we banish cabal hell, and have a single
> common way to 'get Haskell' that just works.*
> 
> [..]
>
> We think this plan solves many different community needs:
> 
>    - We have a clear way to "get Haskell" that works for a wide variety of
>    use cases.
>    - HP installer gets much smaller, and about as minimal as a working
>    installation can get.
>    - By leaving most packages out of the global database, users of
>    cabal-install, will now have far fewer problems. Sandbox builds should now
>    never give users "cabal hell" like warnings.
>    - By building and installing the Platform packages into it's own package
>    db, users get the benefit of building and installing these common packages
>    only once per system, yet can easily bypass them for any given project if
>    desired.
>    - Since the Platform packages are now built and installed as needed,
>    installing on smaller systems or servers without OpenGL will work.

Sounds great to me! Personally, I do not mind how the Haskell Platform 
achieves these goals; I will simply adapt to whatever tools the platform 
happens to install on my machine.

Hopefully, they come with suitable documentation. For instance, one 
thing I don't understand about  stack  yet is in which location it 
"magically" installs GHC and packages, and how I can invoke `ghci` from 
these locations. Somehow, I was unable to understand this from the FAQ.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
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