I have to say that I'm quite surprised this conversation is happening at all. As far as I knew before doing some research in advance of this post, the Haskell Platform is *the* way to install Haskell on a fresh machine. It's certainly what I've relied on in getting Haskell on my machines (both MacOS 10.8). While I personally don't feel the need for the HP to have some curated set of libraries (especially now that there are other curated sets available), I do feel a strong need to have it be nice, shiny, and easy to install. At least for Mac, I don't know of a suitable replacement.
I feel like we, as a community, ask a tremendous amount from our users.* By eliminating the HP, we'll be asking more from users before they're even a proper part of community. This seems like a step in the wrong direction, to me.
Richard
* Here are a few ways in which we ask a ton from users:
- Users have to figure out which libraries to use. Many basic tasks (e.g. parsing, regular expressions) have competing packages, and it's hard to know which is appropriate.
- Users have to deal with a very intricate type system. Basic libraries (like the new Prelude, `vector`, `lens`) use this complexity to their advantage, but perhaps to newcomers' disadvantage. (I'm well aware I'm, in some degree, to blame here!)
- Users have to deal with long, intricate error messages. This comes hand-in-hand with the previous point. We GHC hackers try our best, but I know we fall short of the mark here.
- Once a year, when the new GHC comes out, everything breaks.
- Cabal hell.
In return, the community gives and gives and is ever patient with newcomers. This is wonderful, and I attribute Haskell's growth to the friendliness of the community. But we should be aware of just how steep the curve is.
On Mar 22, 2015, at 12:08 PM, Joachim Breitner
Hi,
Am Sonntag, den 22.03.2015, 10:52 +0100 schrieb Herbert Valerio Riedel:
Currently GHC/Cabal knows about a global package db and a user package db (the user pkg db is is what gets replaced/shadowed by cabal sandboxes). Maybe we need a 3rd package db sitting between the global and the user package db that interacts better with cabal sandboxes?
this would also be great for distributions, which also provide packages that should not (necessarily) in sandboxes, but are installed system wide.
Greetings, Joachim
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