Re: [Haskell-cafe] Minimal Haskell Platform

On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 11:45:22AM +0300, Roman Cheplyaka wrote:

* Simon Hengel [2014-04-15 13:02:38+0800]

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Would it be worthwhile to create a "Minimal Haskell Platform" to create a truly common platform that everybody would be happy using?

I think most Haskell developers use a reasonably recent version of GHC (that would currently still be 7.6.3 for me) and the latest version of cabal-install. Everything else can be installed with cabal-install.

So yes, I think we should just have an easy way to get that minimal setup (+ most importantly don't recommend something to beginners that we don't use ourself).

Where would something like the HP actually make sense? For stuff that has external dependencies that are not easily installable with cabal-install (like curses bindings, SSL support, etc.). We have none of this in the HP. So I think currently we just have additional costs, but no benefits (+ we harm innovation by arbitrarily "endorsing" random packages).

Agreed.

As Tillmann notes, HP is indispensable on Windows, but that is a side effect. Indeed, HP as a simple way to conveniently install the bits that are otherwise hard to install makes perfect sense.

When looking at `network` specifically, I think it does not even have external dependencies, it just needs a C compiler and GNU autotools. So if we care about Windows support, couldn't we just bundle MingGW with a minimalistic GHC + cabal-install distribution. That would not only solve the network case, but also work for other packages that include some C files in the cabal package or need autotools for whatever reason. Cheers, Simon