[Haskell-community] haskell.org download page

[Jan Gerlinger]

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Hi all,

I believe haskell.org and its download section should be directed to
total beginners and they should not be confronted with multiple choices.

As someone who has personally seen people willing to learn Haskell give
up, because they were burnt by the global package database, I think any
global persistent state should be avoided in the tools recommended. This
especially concerns all packages installed globally by default by HP.
Cabal's default workflow (currently and probably for a long time in the
future) also installs packages globally and is thus harmful for
beginners, as they are not able to resolve conflicts and errors.

This leaves me with Stack or a Minimal HP stripped down to only consist
of GHC and Stack. Since a global GHC is not needed when using Stack and
telling people to use `stack ghci` instead of `ghci` is absolutely no
problem in my experience, I would go with Stack.

To summarise:

* haskell.org download section should cater to total beginners.

* Giving multiple options is actively harmful, there should only be one.

* Minimal HP is the wrong choice for this option. Stack is.


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