Yes, you need to know several magic things to go this route. The first is to have that link that Ben Gamari provided in the first place, which is not an obvious thing at all. The second is to know about compression formats that nobody uses on Windows. The .tar.lz file is much smaller can be decoded on Windows using lzip. lzip is available for windows as a 32-bit command-line utility from here: https://www.nongnu.org/lzip/ You need to unzip the file, copy the binaries to somewhere handy (probably a folder you create in c:\Program Files (x86) ), and then add that folder to the path. Then you need to go to the command line and use lzip -d {filename} to decompress the file. This leaves you with a .tar file, which Windows also cannot handle. Installing 7zip makes that extractable, however. You can, however, reduce the complexity of the process at the expense of bandwidth (which most people have copious amounts of these days) by downloading the .tar.xz version. Windows still can't handle this natively, but 7zip can handle both the .xz and .tar decompressions using a single program. The third thing you need to know is that: ghc-8.10.1-windows-extra-src.tar.lz (or .xz) ...which is the only thing in there with "Windows" in the name, is not, in fact, the one you want. Or at least, not that I can tell. It appears to be a bunch of extra tools required to build the source code on Windows. There's a lot in it, so I didn't explore it fully. Also, within the .lz is a bunch of .xz files, but fortunately 7zip can handle those. In any case, the file you actually want is the cryptically-named: ghc-8.10.1-x86_64-unknown-mingw32.tar.lz ...because of course "unknown" in this case means Windows, I guess? Decompressing that, untarring the result, moving the resulting folder to your 'c:\Program Files' folder, and adding the bin subfolder to your path does indeed get you a working ghc and ghci -- from the command line. It doesn't include the GUI versions that I can discern. Nonetheless, this is still probably the easiest current method of installing it. It's not actually hard to do, it just requires you to know several non-obvious things that a new user probably won't know. I'm honestly baffled by the use of .tar.lz or .tar.xz for distributing Windows software. Just using .zip would guarantee that anyone can decompress it without having to install any tools -- Windows supports .zip files natively. In any case, since it doesn't appear to be obviously documented anywhere, the steps to go this route are: 1. Download and install 7zip from here: https://www.7-zip.org/download.html 2. Navigate to the latest version's folder from here: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/ 3. Download ghc-[latest version]-x86_64-unknown-mingw32.tar.xz 4. Right-click it, choose 7zip, and choose Extract to Here 5. Right-click the resulting .tar file, and choose Extract to [folder named after file] 6. In that folder, you should find a folder named ghc-[version]. Copy that to 'C:\Program Files'. 7. In Control Panel, search for "Environment Variables", and click "Edit the System Environment Variables" or "Edit the Environment Variables for your Account" depending on whether you wish other users to be able to use the software. 8. Click "Environment Variables". 9. Scroll to "Path" under either your username or 'System Variables' [see note above] and click Edit. 10. Click "New" and add the 'bin' subfolder of the folder you copied (ex. C:\Program Files\ghc-8.10.1\bin) 11. It should now be installed. To test it, open a command prompt of your choice and type "ghci" or "ghc". On 2020-05-10 6:20 a.m., Francesco Ariis wrote:
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.