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

[Michael Snoyman]

On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Tony Day <tonyday567 at gmail.com> wrote:

> > Its enemies did a very thorough hatchet job.
>
> Not thorough enough I say, as a sworn enemy.  I actually have haskell
> platform installed with batteries included at work on windows (because
> that's how we set up python - I pleaded but got nowhere).  I even have a
> current bug falling somewhere between the platform and stack - something
> crashed looking for the standard linux command line tools - was it the
> msys2 or mingw in platform, or was it stack?  Where do I even turn for help?
>
> I'm not part of the 'they' straw-man you sketch out, and I'm asserting
> that the reality in the community is the opposite - commercial Haskell is
> the runt of the litter and shame on the community for not acknowledging
> this.
>
> At the very least, bashing commercial Haskell interests for being
> commercial is a weak argument, given the reality of how little commercial
> scope exists right now.  Accusations of engagement in monopolistic intent
> is, quite frankly, pure projection.
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 27, 2016 at 1:21 PM, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
The bug you're referring to is this:

https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/issues/251

You can work around it by adding `system-ghc: false` to your config files.
And yes, that basically means that everything shipped with the HP besides
the Stack executable itself is being ignored.

Michael
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