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

[Adam Piper]

That's a pretty awful experience, I'm quite surprised this user followed
through without just giving up.

On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 11:20, Francesco Ariis <fa-ml at ariis.it> wrote:

> 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
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