Instances and DoCon

[Jason Dagit]

On Sat, Sep 20, 2008 at 12:52 AM, Serge D. Mechveliani <mechvel at botik.ru> wrote:
> On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 08:17:12PM +0100, Ian Lynagh wrote:
>> On Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 10:44:53AM +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
>> > |
>> > | And still ghc-6.8.3 builds itself from source.
>> >
>> > I have no idea how -- Happy has been needed for some time.  Maybe someone else does.
>>
>> It's not meant to be needed for building from a source tarball.
>> This should be fixed now.
>
> Dear GHC team,
> can you, please, provide such GHC source distributives which require
> possibly smaller set of programs for the user to separately pre-install?
> For example, do not require of the user to install Alex, Happy and Cabal.
>
> Because we write applications in Haskell. For example, the user needs to
> program algebra by using some CA library written in Haskell. One needs to
> install GHC -- and the simpler the better. In this situation, it is bad
> to force him to think of what is Alex or Happy, and where to find them and
> how to install. The least hindrance in installation makes some users to
> reject the tool:
> "Oh! looks messy, suspicious thing. I tried the binary, but it reports of
> wrong libarary versions. I have already spent one hough! Also these pure
> functional languages look restrictive ... Let me better try the Foo system".

Don't most GHC users just install from a binary distribution?  And if
those users themselves are not Haskell developers, shouldn't they just
be able to get a binary distribution of the applications they are
after?  Also, aren't Alex, Happy and Cabal available as packages or
binary distributions on nearly every platform?

I've never heard anyone complain about Happy, Alex and Cabal as
reasons to avoid using an application written in Haskell or even GHC.
So I have a hard time understanding your position.

Maybe on some platform like Gentoo you need to install these
dependencies, but then wouldn't the package manager assist you in
installing them?  Is it still a complaint when the build is automated?

Jason