One-click Hackage

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Haskell,

it's well-known that large class of users (including haskell
developers) prefer to use visual tools. for hackage/cabal-install this
means that they need a GUI that allow them to find libs they need and
install them. this mean some sort of GUI frontend to cabal-install,
that isn't yet written. but we can go other way

now Hackage web site by itself provides good enough GUI for library
search. the only problem is that after finding something useful, user
needs to type in "cabal install Foo" in her cmdline - and that's in
the best case when she know about cabal-install and had it installed

i think that we are just one click away of full GUI support - all
that's reuired is to publish on Hackage page for Foo library file
Foo.hackage and associate this extension with Cabal. by clicking on
such file user will auto download it, and then cabal will read name of
package to installed from the file

going further, Hackage may provide links to execution of "cabal
update" and other commands, becoming sort of GUI for cabal-install.
this may be provided as files with the same hackage extension

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                          mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com