That's a pretty awful experience, I'm quite surprised this user followed
through without just giving up.
On Sun, 10 May 2020 at 11:20, Francesco Ariis
Il 25 aprile 2020 alle 11:22 José Pedro Magalhães ha scritto:
I honestly don't want this to sound like a rant. I genuinely would like to understand why this multi-step, multi-tool, multi-website process was introduced, how it is superior to a single installer, and whether this is really the process we want newcomers to the language have to follow.
A data point from a user (OS: Win10) on freenode/#haskell-it today. Shared with permission, translated by me:
- he asked: «Hello. To Windows users, can you link the installer to me? It disappeared from the site, now I need to install Chocolatey and to be honest I would prefer not to». I redirected him to the page mentioned here [1] by Ben Gamari and asked why Chocolatey was not an option for him. Reply: «I don't want to use a third party tool, Chocolatey immediately asks me to register to its newsletter... why? Those things are very annoying, I'd rather install Haskell on an RPi and use it via ssh 😅»;
- once the download from [1] was over: «I have downloaded it (400Mb) but I cannot extract it and I don't know what to do with it, it's a .tar.lz file». Indeed after a cursory search, it seems a common (on Windows) open-source extracting tool like 7-zip does not natively support the format [2]. Not having used Windows in 10 years I suggested to try WinZip -- stupid idea, as it does not support ".tar.lz" either and it is proprietary nagware;
- I then directed him to the Stack Win64 installer [3]. Feedback: «Microsoft Defender blocks it! 😂»;
- after this, the user created an Ubuntu VM and installed Haskell via "apt-get install haskell-platform". The installation took a few minutes, he seemed satisfied with it.
[1] https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2020-April/132150.html [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/sevenzip/discussion/45798/thread/9e77409b/?limit=2... [3] https://get.haskellstack.org/stable/windows-x86_64-installer.exe _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.