[Haskell-cafe] Haskell Platform install instructions

[Albert Y. C. Lai]

On 11-02-25 05:40 AM, Michael Snoyman wrote:
> Some of the dependencies for Yesod (such as haskell-src) require
> happy. For the "Yesod in Five Minutes" page[1], I've given
> instructions to cabal install happy and then cabal install yesod.
> However, as Xavier Shay pointed out to me, this won't actually work on
> a vanilla install, since happy gets installed in the cabal bin folder,
> which is not by default on the PATH. Two questions:
>
> * Should we document this somewhere in the Haskell Platform install
> process? I'm sure many old-time users of cabal are well aware that
> they need ~/.cabal/bin in the PATH, but new users will not be.

The need to mention ~/.cabal/bin belongs to the empty user guide of 
cabal-install.

Haskell Platform includes happy; I wonder why one would "cabal install 
happy" after having Haskell Platform.

Haskell Platform normally puts happy in

case os of
   Windows Vista -> \Program Files (x86)\Haskell 
Platform\version\lib\extralibs\bin
   MacOS X -> I don't know, but still not ~/.cabal/bin
   Linux -> case how you obtained of
     Your Linux Distro -> /usr/bin
     Built From Source -> /usr/local/bin

Haskell Platform could put happy in ~/.cabal/bin but would require 
non-default tinkering.

Since Haskell Platform includes cabal-install, the empty user guide of 
Haskell Platform should talk about ~/.cabal/bin, yes. But this is 
because the empty user guide of Haskell Platform is the union of the 
user guides of members such as cabal-install. In other words, fixing it 
in the empty Haskell Platform user guide without fixing it in the empty 
cabal-install user guide fixes only half of the problem.

> I would
> also like to update Yesod's documentation; does anyone have standard
> phrasing that is applicable to all operating systems?

case os of
   Windows Vista -> \Users\username\AppData\Roaming\cabal\bin
   MacOS X -> ~/.cabal/bin
   Linux -> ~/.cabal/bin

> * Should we consider modifying the build tools to automatically look
> for build dependencies in the cabal bin folder?

Fixing build tools (such as cabal-install itself) to secretly search 
~/.cabal/bin fixes only half of the problem. So cabal-install can find 
happy somewhere, great; but I cannot find it, and perhaps I want to use 
it outside of cabal-install.