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

[Francesco Ariis]

Il 25 aprile 2020 alle 11:22 José Pedro Magalhães ha scritto:
> I honestly don't want this to sound like a rant. I genuinely would like
> to understand why this multi-step, multi-tool, multi-website process was
> introduced, how it is superior to a single installer, and whether this is
> really the process we want newcomers to the language have to follow.

A data point from a user (OS: Win10) on freenode/#haskell-it today. Shared
with permission, translated by me:

- he asked: «Hello. To Windows users, can you link the installer to me?
  It disappeared from the site, now I need to install Chocolatey and to be
  honest I would prefer not to».
  I redirected him to the page mentioned here [1] by Ben Gamari and asked
  why Chocolatey was not an option for him.
  Reply: «I don't want to use a third party tool, Chocolatey immediately
  asks me to register to its newsletter... why? Those things are very
  annoying, I'd rather install Haskell on an RPi and use it via ssh 😅»;

- once the download from [1] was over:
  «I have downloaded it (400Mb) but I cannot extract it and I don't know
  what to do with it, it's a .tar.lz file».
  Indeed after a cursory search, it seems a common (on Windows) open-source
  extracting tool like 7-zip does not natively support the format [2].
  Not having used Windows in 10 years I suggested to try WinZip -- stupid
  idea, as it does not support ".tar.lz" either and it is proprietary
  nagware;

- I then directed him to the Stack Win64 installer [3]. Feedback:
  «Microsoft Defender blocks it! 😂»;

- after this, the user created an Ubuntu VM and installed Haskell via
  "apt-get install haskell-platform". The installation took a few minutes,
  he seemed satisfied with it.


[1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2020-April/132150.html
[2] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45798/thread/9e77409b/?limit=25
[3] https://get.haskellstack.org/stable/windows-x86_64-installer.exe