As a new Haskell user, I have to heartily agree about the sign-posts. Cabal is a superb, easy-to-use command-line tool for Haskell package management, but browsing various "getting started with Haskell" pages didn't lead me to clear instructions that cabal exists and that it is really important to install. In addition, may I suggest that the very first thing under Quick Links at http://haskell.org/cabal/ should be the following: Get Cabal Currently, the first link is "How to install a Cabal package" which was quite confusing for me as a new user, since I knew I wanted the "cabal" command on my system and that getting it is a prerequisite to installing cabal packages. Next, in a round-about manner, the link sends the user to http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal/How_to_install_a_Cabal_package which is fairly dense reading considering that the user is just trying to get cabal. At the bottom of the third paragraph of that page, it links to http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Cabal-Install. The Cabal-Install page itself provides an introduction paragraph stating that there exists a "caball-install" package which sounds enticing--- but wait, is it a package? Doesn't that mean I need cabal to install cabal-install? What's going on here Strangely, the "Usage" section is listed before the "Installation" section which further confounded me until I read everything carefully. So in retrospect, I would have very much appreciated something like this (my blog entry to future Haskellers). Perhaps we could create the "Get Cabal" page and split it down the middle, one side for Windows and one side for Mac OS X / Linux / Unix. It should be very minimal and have all of the necessary steps first with commentary later in case things go wrong or the visitor decides to return for details. It also might be a good idea to use the cabal-specific pages on the wiki to redirect the user to the official cabal page where the official instructions reside since they show up in Google searches Duane Johnson http://blog.inquirylabs.com/ On Mar 21, 2009, at 3:44 PM, Duncan Coutts wrote:
Hi all,
I should have done this ages ago but there's now a Cabal FAQ on the Cabal website:
http://haskell.org/cabal/FAQ.html
It's not linked in yet, I'm looking for feedback and patches. The Cabal website is now maintained in darcs so it's easy to send in contributions:
darcs get http://haskell.org/cabal/
For new pages like the FAQ I've been using markdown via pandoc. If appropriate we can migrate old pages to use that too.
The main Cabal home page needs some love. We should have the cabal-install download directly on the front page. We should have quick intro tutorials for using the cabal command line program to install packages. There's lots of good material in the user guide but it is not well sign-posted.
Duncan
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