[haskell-infrastructure] wither the Platform

[Mark Lentczner]

On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 7:27 AM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com> wrote:

> I thought the current language on the page was rather balanced?
>

It leads any user away from the Platfrom:

   - From the homepage
   - "Downloads" from the top bar
   - First links are three OS links, click any one....
      - The Windows one has one link the Platform at bottom after giving
      you a different way to install
      - The OS X only mentions the Platform if you have an older OS
      - The Linux page doesn't mention the Platform at all.
   - If you read the paragraph on Platform - it basically says don't use it.

Personally, I think multiple options in this regard is a failure. We aught
to have one path that works for the vast majority of use cases. The reason
is that there are many build and packaging choices in getting from source
to installed tool chain, and each of these paths makes them differently...
which leads to just tons of incompatibility and confusion.

If the community wants minimal installers - fine - I wish we had one way
not two or three. The Platform has a very complete and automated build -
and installers tested on a wide variety of OS versions - it could easily be
adapted to a more minimal approach (as per my GPS proposal a way back) if
that's what we want.

I'd really like to invite folks creating minimal installers to rally around
the large body of work, experience, and code in building the Haskell
Platform installers. They could easily fashion minimal builds from it (with
the Shake build system this is now like a single .hs file of work...)...
then perhaps we could have Platform "minimal" and "full" releases.
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