[Hugs-bugs] the woes of non-cvs haskellers

[Claus Reinke]

Dear all,

I'm getting more and more worried about Haskell users who 
depend on multiple Haskell packages and compilers, but don't 
want to follow the cvs developments for all of these packages. 
I have the feeling that Haskellers who rely on pre-packaged
binaries are not currently getting a good impression of the
state of the art.

To give just one concrete example, what packages do I 
recommend to someone wanting to learn a bit of Haskell, and 
do some graphics and perhaps windowing, on Windows?

- Hugs (Winhugs bug in current binary release, so better avoid
        that and use plain Hugs?)
- HGL (does it work with latest Hugs/GHC, or do I need older 
        versions? which ones?)
- GHC (current binary release seems to have serious probs on 
        some Windows versions; has also seen some rapid 
        development breakage recently, e.g., TH syntax, forcing 
        other packages to play catch-up just to get working again)
- wxHaskell (works with ghc-6.0.1, will it work with 6.2? what about 
        Hugs? what about ghc-6.4?)
- some generic text-editor (but on Windows98, the way that .hs
        files are associated with Hugs/GHC cannot be modified in
        the standard dialogues, as they can for other associations, 
        so how do I associate .hs files with an editor? I wouldn't 
        want to recommend some beginner editing the registry for 
        that purpose..)

The issues are usually small, but there are many of them, each
package has its own, and all too often the response is "fixed in 
CVS, will be in next release".  

Of course, the next release is a while a away and by that time, 
there'll be a different set of small issues plagueing the next set 
of binary releases. So, just getting someone started requires
careful investigation/testing and some thinking (instead of: 
"just download and install the latest Haskell starters set").

A modular way to fix this would be to have at least once-a-month
patch updates of binary packages, so that one would never be
more than a month away from the fixed versions (instead of having
to wait for the next releases of everything).

A broader approach would be to try and show a united Haskell 
tools front to the general Haskeller: Identify a core set of Haskell
tools (the above four would be my initial suggestion), and make
sure that the latest binary releases for these are always in synch
with each other. In other words, someone could go download 
them, make a "Haskell tools, Spring 2004" CD, and be sure that 
they actually work together while he/she's trying to learn Haskell.

Both GHC and Hugs have had release candidate testing in the
past, but experience and mailing list archives show that there's 
always a number of issues that are only detected after the 
binary releases. On Windows at least, it seems that everyone
is relying on Sigbjorn to do all the packaging - couldn't the 
creation of updated installers be automated (or Haskellised), 
so that he'd only have to be bothered for the initial packaging, 
not for patchlevel updates?

There are similar issues for Haskellers needing a larger set of 
tools and libraries, but those will hopefully be addressed by 
the library infrastructure project in the long run, so I'm just 
asking about the state of the core tools here.

Opinions?
Claus