[Haskell-cafe] Improvements to package hosting and security

[Tillmann Rendel]

Hi,

Michael Snoyman wrote:
> That said, I think bundling the necessary Git tooling with MinGHC is an
> easy win.

Agreed. I mostly want to lobby for actually bundling it (properly, see 
below) instead of merely hand-waiving about how easy it is to install 
git on Windows.

> here's actually a really easy solution to "have Git installed": bundle it with MinGHC

This solution is certainly possible, but I'm not so sure whether it is 
*really easy*. From my perspective, MinGHC+git should be able to coexist 
on a system with some other system that bundles git, say, FOO+git, 
and/or just a copy of git that the user installed. (Otherwise, 
installing git after installing MinGHC+git would break MinGHC+git which 
would be unfortunate, wouldn't it?)

Now how should the various copies of git interact?

  - should they share a configuration file?
  - should they use the same shell?
  - should they ever call each other?

I'm imaging a search-path-tweaking nightmare to get this to work. For 
example, what if a user sets up `git bisect` to call `cabal update` (as 
part of some larger script) which in turns would call `git whatever` to 
update the index. Presumably, that should be different copies of git 
involved.

But maybe cabal would need only some low-level git stuff which don't 
interact with user configuration or use the shell at all? That would 
make things easier.

I'm not sure how valid my concerns here are, but I'm not convinced by 
"Git is fairly well supported on Windows these days and installs easily."

   Tillmann