[Haskell-cafe] When did it become so hard to install Haskell onWindows?

[Anthony Clayden]

@lonetiger, I take it you've never had to support software installs on
shared machines, or students'  machines where you can't be too sure of the
config?

The reasons against using powershell and curl (or equiv) I would have
thought are pretty obvious:
you don't know what you're getting/what it might be downloading.
You might mis-type some command and cause havoc on your machine or on your
network.

With Hugs you download the packed-up .exe; you disconnect from the internet
and run virus checks; you run the install while your machine is still in
quarantine. With Hugs install you (usually) don't need to go into Admin
mode.

Just because some long-winded process is "completely standard on Windows",
doesn't mean it's fit for use.
That's a general learning about stuff from Microsoft.

AntC

➢ Then I have to know what powershell.exe is, use an administrative
prompt, and enter scary commands in it.

> Powershell has been the standard shell in Windows for well over the past decade. Every single script from Microsoft or third parties come with powershell for automation.
It’s understandable that you may not know it since your primary
platform isn’t Windows. But it’s been included in every single Windows
version for the past 13 years.

> An administrative prompt is nothing different than running sudo or clicking on that installer that you *assumed* not to be scary because you didn’t see the actions it was performing.
That scary looking command is nothing but a curl command allowing the
one time execution of a script from a remote source. As in a script
that’s not physically on your machine.

> So what exactly makes this scary? Is it because

> Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

> Is more verbose than

> curl -sSL https://path.to.some.script/ | sh

> or because the technologies used while completely standard on Windows aren’t known to the casual user?
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