Very good! This one is perhaps a missing piece, if you are saying that a Windows user cannot use GHC without MSYS: • On Windows, it does not provide a complete environment (missing MSYS). On the other hand these three are examples of HP getting in the way: • By placing a large number of packages in the global package database, Haskell Platform installations are more easily corrupted. • The choice of package versions conflicts with the needs of many commonly used packages. • Some of the package versions included with the platform have known and severe bugs, and cannot be reliably upgraded. My question was: can they be fixed so that HP does not get in the way? E.g. if we solve the multiple-versions-of-packages problem with Cabal (which Duncan in a separate thread says we can), then that would solve the first two; and for the third, I guess the solution is to release a new version of HP. Simon From: Mike Meyer [mailto:mwm@mired.org] Sent: 25 March 2015 09:30 To: Simon Peyton Jones Cc: Mark Lentczner; Gershom B; Manuel M T Chakravarty; haskell-platform@projects.haskell.org; haskell-infrastructure@community.galois.com; Duncan Coutts; ghc-devs@haskell.org; Haskell Libraries Subject: Re: wither the Platform On Wed, Mar 25, 2015 at 4:09 AM, Simon Peyton Jones mailto:simonpj@microsoft.com> wrote: So that was the plan. I still think it’s a good plan. But it clearly is not working well, and I’m hazy about why. Possible reasons: Possibly relevant is the stackage commentary on HP at http://www.stackage.org/install#why-not-haskell-platform: • On Windows, it does not provide a complete environment (missing MSYS). • By placing a large number of packages in the global package database, Haskell Platform installations are more easily corrupted. • The choice of package versions conflicts with the needs of many commonly used packages. • Some of the package versions included with the platform have known and severe bugs, and cannot be reliably upgraded.