[Haskell-community] haskell.org download page

[Friedrich Wiemer]

Hi all,

Jan has my full support -- I'm just one of these beginners, meaning I
have tried several attempts to get started with Haskell and gave up
after fighting some days with cabal.
Currently I give stack a shot and have no other system GHC installed.
This works very nicely for me and I have not encountered any problems.

I would be really happy with seeing this approach supported by the whole
ecosystem.

Cheers,
Friedrich

On 29.08.2016 16:43, Jan Gerlinger wrote:
> 
> 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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> Haskell-community at haskell.org
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> 

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