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

[Simon Marlow]

On 24/09/2015 18:23, John Wiegley wrote:
>>>>>> Michael Snoyman <michael at fpcomplete.com> writes:
>
>> 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 couldn't agree more, Michael. The new user is first in my mind with all of
> this.
>
> Perhaps we need a poll. So far the presented options are:
>
>      1. HP       Stack    Minimal
>      2. Stack    HP       Minimal
>      3. Stack    Minimal  HP
>      4. Minimal  HP       Stack
>      5. Minimal  Stack    HP
>
> I'll open voting at the current state, choosing #4. My reason is that HP and
> Stack will soon merge, and I'm willing to put Minimal first based on
> Christopher's and Gershom's arguments.
>
> Further, the reason HP is staying on the list for now is that I'd prefer not
> to conflate issues. I'm happy to start a new discussion, recommending to the
> committee that we remove HP, if others wish to.

I think it would be strange to download and install Haskell from the 
download page and then not be able to type "ghci" and get a prompt, or 
use ghc to compile some code.  I appreciate that there are now a lot of 
users and use cases that just don't use Haskell this way, but there are 
also a lot who do.  We won't be able to figure out the relative size of 
these two groups easily, and I suspect a vote/poll is likely to give 
misleading results.  But since there are few downsides to the minimal 
installer for those who want to use Stack, that seems like the best 
overall choice.

Hence, #4/#5 for me equally.

Ideally the Linux minimal installer would include Stack too, for 
consistency and so that we don't have to have the explicit special-case 
text on the download page.

Cheers
Simon