[Haskell-cafe] Status of ghcup?

[Todd Wilson]

Thanks, Mario, for that suggestion; it brought back memories! That is, in
fact, what we used to do in the "old days," before the BYOD craze took over
and we gave up our servers. But you're right: it did have its advantages
and would be one solution. I remember having scripts for setting up and
archiving the accounts each semester, and automated turn-in scripts that
would grab student lab submissions from their home directories each week
and run test suites on them. I wonder if I still have copies of all those
scripts and how much effort it would take to bring all of that back -- not
to mention getting a server I could host it on.

Having thus just gone down memory lane, however, it still seems that this
problem could be solved for everyone simultaneously if we could just get a
single "click-to-install" set-up on haskell.org.

--Todd

On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 6:01 PM Mario J. Hesles <mariojlhm at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Todd,
>
> Perhaps you could set everything up once on a server, create accounts for
> each of your students, and then just have them ssh into it and do their
> work remotely? It's not ideal, but it would be better than wasting so much
> time debugging boring install issues. The adventurous ones can try
> installing everything themselves.
>
> Sincerely,
> Mario J. Hesles
>
>
> On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 6:00 PM Todd Wilson <twilson at csufresno.edu> wrote:
>
>> Sigh. As a college educator who is trying to use Haskell in as many
>> classes as possible, I am still disheartened by how much effort is required
>> by students to get the toolchain and additional libraries installed and
>> working on their various platforms. I usually have to waste time during the
>> first two or three weeks of class (and this semester it has extended to
>> more than four) with students over this, whereas instead I should be able
>> to send out a link before my class begins and expect that almost all of
>> them will have everything installed on the first day. I know this topic has
>> been discussed here and elsewhere, and that there are efforts underway to
>> improve the situation, but I just want to make a plug again for easy
>> Haskell installation for beginners. Diversity in the ecosystem is great,
>> but for people trying to get started, there should be one simple and
>> surefire way to get up and running, with a clear path later for upgrading
>> the environment in any number of different directions.
>>
>> On Tue, Feb 21, 2023 at 3:26 PM Dominick Samperi <djsamperi at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I watched an interesting YouTube video explaining how to install and use
>>> the Haskell extension in VS code, but the information appears to be
>>> obsolete, because there is no mention of ghcup, and ghcup is now
>>> required, along with a new version of the Haskell extension (the old one
>>> is labeled "legacy").
>>>
>>> Unfortunately, I could not install ghcup on Windows due to obscure
>>> PowerShell
>>> security issues, or missing libraries in MSYS. While wrestling with this
>>> problem
>>> I discovered that Unix tools from Rtools must not be in PATH while
>>> working
>>> with Stack, probably due to incompatible MSYS versions. But removing
>>> Rtools
>>> from PATH does not resolve the ghcup installation problems.
>>>
>>> Any tips on ghcup installation under Windows would be appreciated.
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Dominick
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