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

[Kostiantyn Rybnikov]

Exactly my thoughts. With all the love I have for Stack, if you want to
just run ghc(i), you wouldn't be able to do so after installing stack.
You'd need to:

1. run `stack setup`
2. edit your PATH to point wherever ghc(i) is installed

And these aren't even clear out of current instructions for a newbie.

So, for me, ideal option would be: Minimal which always provides stack (and
recommends it for managing projects). Before that happens, I voted for
"stack minimal HP" way, because it's better to learn how stack works than
to fall into "I don't have stack, I don't want to waste my time on it,
let's just use everything global" way.

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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