[Haskell-cafe] Some tooling questions

[Sven Panne]

Am So., 22. Aug. 2021 um 20:24 Uhr schrieb Georgi Lyubenov <
godzbanebane at gmail.com>:

> [...] I would recommend using ghcup to install HLS, as it takes care to
> install all of the binaries automatically (unless something else has
> already done so).
>

Installing HLS was the least confusing part of this mess: Download
https://github.com/haskell/haskell-language-server/releases/download/1.3.0/haskell-language-server-Linux-1.3.0.tar.gz,
unpack into ~/.local/bin, done. (Well, actually I like to unpack things
into ~/.local/opt/<package-name-and-version> and use symlinks into
~/.local/bin to keep things separated, but that's just my personal taste.)

The real confusion came when I realized that HLS 1.3.0 is far from
feature-complete for GHC 9.0.1, some issues on its issue tracker gave
contradicting information, installing e.g. ormolu by hand didn't help etc.
etc.

Regarding ghcup: IIRC it was very cabal-centric when it came out, but
personally I totally ignore cabal and use stack exclusively (like most
people if I remember the last surveys correctly). Recent versions of ghcup
seem to handle stack, too, but there are mysterious remarks about XDG
directory structures on the ghcup-hs project page (see my other mail).
Furthermore, I'm not sure what the current state of affairs regarding cabal
vs. stack is: I really don't want to have duplicated toolchains and tons of
GBs of duplicated compiled packages lying around, but this was the case
when I last had a look. Some packages don't work with stack out of the box
and need cabal (or vice versa), and then things get really annoying and
space-/time-consuming.

Setting up a development environment from scratch for a recent GHC involves
tools battling against each other, reading incomplete and/or confusing
documentation and tons of free disk space. It's a bit like an ancient text
adventure, but less entertaining... :-}

Cheers,
   S.

>
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