[Haskell-cafe] high probability of installation problems and quality of the glorious implementation

[FFT]

I'm still learning Haskell and also evaluating whether I want to use
the language in my work.

It seems like a fascinating language so far (although I don't know if
laziness will be a detriment later for me eventually), but I'm a bit
worried about the overall quality of its GHC implementation.

For example, I tried installing GHC-6.10.2 on my Ubuntu 8.04 machine
(probably the most mainstream Linux these days).

1st attempt: binary => failed "the impossible happened, report bug" (I
think it's already in bugzilla for an even earlier version)

2nd attempt: source and docs => followed README, but "make" failed
while building docs

3rd attempt: source only, no docs => make install succeeded, but ghci
now seems to have its "readline" screwed up (no editing, can't quit
even with Ctrl-C or Ctrl-D), while Ubuntu-bundled 6.8.* ghci works
fine in this regard.

If these kinds of issues are common only during installation, I can
live with that, but if GHC is flaky overall, having to deal with this
may cancel out whatever productivity advantages Haskell provides.

If the quality of the installation procedures is different from the
compiler itself, can you explain why?