[Haskell-community] haskell.org download page

[Gershom B]

On August 28, 2016 at 2:03:18 PM, Michael Carpenter
(oldmanmike.dev at gmail.com) wrote:

> Also, why would it be advisable to promote HP over Stack?

The minimal HP, which is proposed to move to the top is simply an
installer that includes ghc, and core tools such as alex, happy, cabal
and stack. That’s it. It is nicer because, as we’ve discussed
previously, many users expect the full suite of command-line tools to
be available directly to them (i.e. they can just type ‘ghci’ and it
works) and many many tutorials and books are written assuming this.
Furthermore, it enables both stack and cabal workflows. As far as I
know, it has no real downsides and I don’t understand the opposition
to it outside of, perhaps, a belief that nobody should ever be
provided with the cabal binary. As such, replacing the existing
minimal installersm (which are not getting updated) with the
HP-minimal installers (which serve the same purpose, and are getting
updated) seems like the most obvious and striaghtforward course of
action to me.

> 1) As far as I can tell, this discussion is meaningless without the
> feedback of newcomers to Haskell who are attempting to set up their
> environment on Windows. Linux and Mac users don't need minghc and have a
> package manager anyways to install whatever they want. Experienced users
> aren't the priority of the Download page as we already know which download
> we actually want and where it is, even if its less direct than the
> beginners option.

I’m not sure how true this is — linux users at times want a newer
binary than is provided by their package manager. Also, many mac users
don’t use package managers.

> 2) This really just boils down to the political gridlock between HP and
> Stack. Unless the actual parties involved in that gridlock can hammer out
> an actual decision directly, why have an obscure vote on an obscure mailing
> list? Such an act comes off as clandestine.

As per: https://wiki.haskell.org/Haskell.org_committee the list serves
as a forum for the committee, which is the historical body in charge
of haskell.org and its subdomains, to discuss actions under its
purview with a broader group of interested people. There is no polling
mechanism as such — the committee is empowered to act, but this forum
was created as a way to ensure that people had a single unified venue
to discuss publically such actions. It was announced both to
haskell-cafe as well as the reddit at the time of its creation. We
can’t expect committee members to follow discussions all over
reddit/twitter/etc nor can we expect such discussions to archive well
and uniformly so we have a future record.

—Gershom