Hopefully that wouldn't become the only way to download GHC.
That wasn't my intention to suggest it to be the One True Way to download it.
Sounds great, but is it reasonable? GNU/Linux package managers AFAIK don't install Haskell libraries either
Some do! On Fedora, the Haskell libraries that are shipped are prefixed with `ghc-`, and Arch Linux has become quite infamous due to the way they ship dynamically-linked Haskell libraries and executables. By GUI I was thinking of something like DNFDragora[0] and its Ubuntu counterpart (whose name I forgot).
It's true that one-liners and scripting is harder in Cmd, but simple commands (no pipes, no flow control etc.) that are the bread and butter for developers work just fine. I sense I'm missing some context; why is this an issue?
cmd.exe is fundamentally a foreign interface to most Windows users, even for developers. IDEs and GUIs have reigned for a long long time in Windows Land, and Microsoft has no will to change this state of fact. WSL is a tool developed to Linux / macOS power-users who incidentally need to deal with Windows, or needed an argument to switch to the platform. In addition to all of this, shipping a .tar.lz format was a terrible mistake, for no tool shipped with Windows is able to properly handle it, but I do not wish to blame anyone, it just needs to be changed to .zip and we can be done with it. [0]: https://github.com/manatools/dnfdragora