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

[Boespflug, Mathieu]

Hi John,

agreed, overdoing the downloads page is certainly a risk. And the
added text does cover ground that is expanded on in the click-through
sections. My concern is that as things stand, I find it unlikely that
a new user will grok the subtleties of going for one option rather
than the other. Summarizing the trade-offs (which I think by this
point no one is disputing) right at the top should help the user
_understand how to weigh his/her options_. I think it's not a problem
if some info ends up being repeated: few users will be reading the
entire Downloads page top-to-bottom (already 5.5 screen-fulls over
here!).

Without the tradeoffs explained pithily at the top, as as new user, I
go the downloads page and I see that e.g. HP gives me plenty that I
probably want. Sounds good to me! :) The page tells me that Stack
gives me "the capacity to download and install" the same thing too,
rather than that happening out-of-the-box. That doesn't sound very
compelling. Why wouldn't I want everything just there from the get-go?
Turns out there are good reasons why at this point you probably
_don't_ want to be using the HP if you want to hack on multiple
projects at once, reason being simply that HP assumes all projects can
make do with a shared instance of the exact same versions of the
libraries and tools that it ships with, when this assumption does not
hold true in practice (again, in the future this may change).


On 25 September 2015 at 02:30, John Wiegley <johnw at newartisans.com> wrote:
>>>>>> Boespflug, Mathieu <m at tweag.io> writes:
>
>> this is a nice summary of all options. May I suggest the following
>> refinements to the summaries:
>
> Hi Mathieu,
>
> I like your enhancements, but I'm worried about it becoming *too* informative
> for new users. At a certain level of detail, it turns into a wall of text that
> no one reads. Like a lens, too little or too much focus is equally bad.
>
> Can we make the text at the top both pithy and communicative, without
> repeating details that are given in the click-through sections? We currently
> discuss "what you get" at the click-through. We haven't really presented
> "consequences", and I'm loathe to add yet another section, unless people here
> think otherwise.
>
> This is just the download page, after all. It's not meant to be an in-depth
> presentation of each option's pros and cons. Those capable of following such a
> discussion would probably not go to the download page to find it.
>
> John