[Haskell-community] Request for comment: New haskell.org download page

[Michael Snoyman]

On Thu, Sep 24, 2015 at 8:20 AM, John Wiegley <johnw at newartisans.com> wrote:

> As mentioned earlier, I've been working on a draft version of the new
> Haskell
> download page in consultation with Simon PJ, Michael Snoyman, and Gershom
> Bazerman. The goal has been twofold:
>
>   a) add stack as an explicit option, and
>
>   b) add text to each option indicating clearly what it provides and where
> to
>      get further help, so users can understand the options and make an
>      informed choice.
>
> We've sought to keep the text factual, rather than imply that one option is
> "best" for any particular class of user, since opinions vary so widely on
> this
> point.
>
> At the following link, you'll find a draft version of the new page for
> comment:
>
>     https://gist.github.com/jwiegley/153d968ddfc9046ee4c9
>
> Hopefully it can go live on haskell.org next week, so please contribute
> your
> edits here, or by pull request. The goal is to explain each option so that
> people can make an informed decision.
>
> However, the order of presentation does imply that whatever comes first is
> "preferred" even if that is not the intent. The order currently given is
> HP,
> Stack, Minimal. Chris has already made a few points about changing this
> order,
> so let's continue that discussion and see where it leads us.
>
> Bear in mind that this is (hopefully) only an interim state. The plan is to
> add Stack to the Platform, and render the Platform minimal, which will
> consolidate this page down to a single, recommended download path.
>
> At the bottom of the gist are incomplete sections on third party libraries
> and
> alternate installation approaches. These have yet to be written. The hope
> is
> to resolve the top content first and sort the rest out after; however,
> ideas
> for that content is most welcome too.
>
> Thank you,
>   John Wiegley
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>


Firstly, thank you John for working on this.

Secondly, I'd like to make clear what I think the goal for the downloads
page should be: new users. Experienced Haskellers are unlikely to even
visit this downloads page, and are likely well aware of the situation
around tooling to make an informed decision regardless of what this page
says. I'd like us to constrain discussion to "what's best for a new user."
I haven't heard anyone object to this idea before.

I'll repeat what I've said in various other places: given the current state
of the Haskell Platform and the fact that it's known to cause many problems
- especially for new users - it should not be top option. I recommend
putting Stack at the top. My arguments are:

1. It's being designed from the ground up to give a good new user
experience in terms of UX
2. Curated package sets by default is (IMO) the best option for new users.
We don't want a new user to download a massive installer, run `cabal
install foo`, only to find out that there's a bug in the most recent
version of foo preventing it from installing. (That's not even getting into
issues of dependency solving.)
3. There's a complete guide to using Stack available which is targeted at
new users. A common complaint we see about people starting with cabal is
that they trash their package databases by not using sandboxes, and then
being told they did it the wrong way. Both the change in default behavior
and the guide will help that problem.
4. New users will often not know in advance which version of GHC they
really need. Stack can handle that for them by downloading the appropriate
GHC for their project.
5. There's a clear upgrade story for Stack, including: upgrading Stack
itself, upgrading to new snapshots, and upgrading GHC.
6. It's already built for a large number of OSes
7. On Windows, it's the only solution right now that provides a full MSYS2
+ Pacman setup, allowing both building the network package without
modifying the PATH, and installing new system libraries via pacman[1]

I'll stop there, it's already a pretty long list. I'd like to make a
request for the rest of this discussion: instead of arguing about what the
current state of the downloads page is, or what may be happening in the
future, can we focus on what will be best for new users today? If someone
wants to make an argument for putting the HP at the top, for example, it
should be based on "the HP is the best choice for new users today because
X."

Michael

[1] https://twitter.com/snoyberg/status/638359459304239104
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