[Haskell-cafe] Self-contained GHC for Mac

[Yitzchak Gale]

Richard Cobbe wrote:
>>>> Asking purely out of curiosity: what's the advantage to doing this over
>>>> using the Haskell Platform installer?  (Other than the fact that the latter
>>>> hasn't seen a release in a year, I mean.)

Bob Hutchison wrote:
>>> That’s a pretty good reason :-)

There has indeed been an usual delay in the current
HP release. Despite Mark Lentzner's hard work it has
gone way past due. Not a small part of the reason for
that delay was the Mac platform, with all of the problems
introduced by Xcode 5.

It looks like the next HP is finally nearing release though.
It will be based on GHC 7.8.2.

Bob Ippolito wrote:
>> In addition to that, you can only have one Haskell Platform install

Erik Hesselink wrote:
> I have three platforms installed. As long as they have different GHC
> versions, there's no problem, I think.

And no two HP's have every had the same GHC version. So that
should never be an issue.

That said, I think I might prefer having just one HP and then this
new method for other versions of GHC.

What I like most about this is that since it doesn't need to be bundled
with the HP libraries, this installer will be much easier to update
promptly when new versions of GHC are released. So I can get
the best of both worlds - the standard set of HP packages and
versions, plus other versions of GHC that aren't part of an HP
release.

Regards,
Yitz