[Haskell-cafe] Binary serialization, was Re: Abstraction leak

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi

It's not a great experience now, but hopefully things are moving in
the right direction.

> - Found crypto 3.0.3 on hackage.
> - Tried to build, it depends on NewBinary

Cabal-install is intended to remove this problem, so that you can say
"i want crypto" and it gets everything that requires.

> - Found that on hackage, downloaded and built OK. Lots of scary
> warnings about happy, greencard etc, not being found during configure,
> but let's go on.

I've complained about these before, although I don't think anyone
considered doing anything about it.

> - Installed NewBinary as I didn't know how to make crypto find it
> without installing it. I'm a bit nervous, as I don't know how to
> *un*install it after I've finished. And it installed to my C drive,
> where I'd really rather it went somewhere else. There is probably
> documentation on how to do this, but remember, all I really want to do
> is to write a tiny program to get the MD5 checksum of a file.

--prefix should put it where you want. What you really want is a
Windows user interface, which is what I want too.

> - crypto builds and installs OK. But where are the docs? Not installed
> anywhere obvious, not on hackage. Try google.

You can install them with runhaskell Setup haddock, but I have no idea
where they end up. They will be on hackage at some point, with
cross-indexing etc.

> - But no simple examples, and the haddoc docs show APIs, but not usage examples!

Complain to the author. I always try and include a manual with at
least one short example of how to use the library to do something
interesting. Unfortunately all these things take time, something that
not everyone has.

> I see you've already responded, and we're in broad agreement. So I
> won't labour the point. It's an infrastructure issue rather than a
> technical one, and it *will* improve. What will be interesting is how
> much the generally lousy Windows experience can be improved

Part of the problem is that the number of Windows Haskell developers
is low. Another part of the problem is that some people have scorn and
contempt for Windows. Alas, those things are hard to change.

Thanks

Neil