[Haskell] Re: ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.10.3

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Fri, 15 May 2009 09:16:13 +0100, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com>
wrote:

>On 15/05/2009 05:52, Benjamin L.Russell wrote:
>> What happened to the Windows installation section in the corresponding
>> User's Guide?  The User's Guide for GHC version 6.10.2 (see
>> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.10.2/html/users_guide/index.html)
>> had section 2.2: Installing on Windows (see
>> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.10.2/html/users_guide/install-windows.html#winfaq),
>> but this section seems to be missing in the corresponding document for
>> version 6.10.3 (see
>> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/users_guide/index.html).
>> Not only that, but the entire chapter "2: Installing GHC" seems to be
>> missing.
>
>The "Installing GHC" section was mostly out-of-date and wrong, so I 
>removed it.  Some of the material, such as the section on the layout of 
>the tree, has been updated and moved to the GHC Building Guide, here
>
>http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building
>
>We also have lots of information on the GHC web site about obtaining and 
>installing GHC, so if we need anything else I think that would be the 
>best place to put it.

Ah, I see.

I just checked out that section, but although it includes information
about building GHC, it doesn't seem to include information about
simply installing GHC using a binary.  This could become an issue if a
new user unfamiliar with the installation suddenly decides to upgrade;
it is unclear without that documentation whether it is necessary to
uninstall the previous version first.

More specifically, section "2.2.2 Moving GHC Around" indicates that
the entire GHC tree can be freely moved around "just by copying the
c:/ghc/ghc-version directory" (although it is necessary "to fix up the
links in 'Start/All Programs/GHC/ghc-version'" if this is done);
however, this information is not evident from the information provided
by the Windows installer.  This information initially led me to
conclude that uninstalling the previous version wasn't necessary to
upgrade; without this information, a new user may not be able to
determine whether uninstalling a previous version is necessary to
upgrade, and could make upgrading more confusing.

-- Benjamin L. Russell
-- 
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