A future for the Windows packaging situation.

[David Macek]

On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 12:56 PM Hécate <hecate at glitchbra.in> wrote:
> As some of you may have seen from the long threads in haskell-cafe@,
> countless steps of various difficulty for Windows users
> (excluding power-users) need to be taken in order to have a proper
> working GHC / Haskell installation on their machine.

Could you (or someone) summarize these issues and steps?  I remember
one of the big issues was *network* and the likes (which is frankly an
issue with other languages as well), but from the sound of this post,
I assume there's more.

> Their contract would involve the initial setup of CI tasks able to
> produce MSIX packages

Hopefully that wouldn't become the only way to download GHC.

> Ideally we could have a GUI to install libraries easily, like many
> GNU/Linux package managers offer.

Sounds great, but is it reasonable? GNU/Linux package managers AFAIK
don't install Haskell libraries either.

> The important thing to keep in mind is that the GNU/Linux and macOS
> users *cannot* hold the Windows users to the same standards in
> terms of CLI usability.

It's true that one-liners and scripting is harder in Cmd, but simple
commands (no pipes, no flow control etc.) that are the bread and
butter for developers work just fine.  I sense I'm missing some
context; why is this an issue?

-- 
David Macek