[Haskell-community] haskell.org download page

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2016-08-27 at 06:50:07 +0200, Jason Dagit wrote:

> I just realized that the Minimal installer listed first on the Downloads
> page (https://www.haskell.org/downloads) is deprecated and "dead". This
> creates an unfortunate situation where our top suggested way to get haskell
> immediately tells the user it's dead.
>
> I think that we should remove mention of the minimal installer ASAP on the
> grounds that the HP now comes in minimal and full variants.

You seem to be referring to the minimal installer for Windows mostly
(i.e. MinGHC), and it makes sense what you propose in that context.

However, I consider the Linux-related information for minimal installer hosted at

  https://www.haskell.org/downloads/linux

still very relevant, despite MinGHC being obsoleted. Not the least,
because the Stack or HP+Stack options currently both fail to provide a
good beginner experience on all Linux distributions.

Currently, for the just released Ubuntu 16.10 beta you need to use the
system-packaged GHC 7.10.3 package as otherwise you'll likely run into
linker errors due to PIE (and other Linux distros appear to be switching
to PIE by default in their GCC toolchain as well).

I still haven't had time to patch up my GHC PPA to add support for
Ubuntu 16.10, nor do GHC HQ provided GHC bindists work there yet
out-of-the-box, nor do we have addressed the issue for GHC 8.0.2 yet. So
it's unclear to me when the HP distro will have a GHC that works on
PIE-by-default Linux distros.

That being said, assuming the minimal installer variant get dropped from
downloads, where is downloads/linux going to move to, and how will it be
discoverable in future?

Cheers,
  hvr