[Haskell-cafe] [Haskell] GHC is a monopoly compiler

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Sep 26, 2016 at 11:11 PM, Michael Sloan <mgsloan at gmail.com> wrote:

> LOL! Oh man, this guy must be pulling my leg... Haskell platform was
> never a batteries included plan.  It was a plan for package
> bureaucracy, mixed in with a broken installation approach.  Sorry, but
> that was not a good enough attempt at emulating python's "batteries
> included" . From https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0206/
>

Wrong.

Its enemies did a very thorough hatchet job. But they did let on their real
intent: "batteries included" meant they can't force people to install their
new incompatible batteries whenever they decide. "Batteries included" was
exactly what they did NOT want, and do not want, because it limits them;
unless, of course, they are the only source of the batteries.

So now we have a battery store run by a company, which also ships its own
build tool that works primarily with that store, and requires you to
specify which generation of batteries to use --- and still runs into
conflicts when someone wants to mix different versions of things because
they're building the tool with the parts they need instead of the ones
authorized by the store.

Granted, a largeish chunk of the problem is that putting anything into the
"batteries included" package space (ghc global packages) makes using any
other versions of those packages scary at best. This is still a problem for
the packages that ghc itself uses, and are therefore difficult to upgrade
without replacing ghc.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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