Re: [Haskell-cafe] When did it become so hard to installHaskellonWindows?

And to be clear, if it because you don’t want to use a commandline and want an installer Chocolatey also provides a GUI overlay, It is after all. A bog standard package manager. https://github.com/chocolatey/ChocolateyGUI/releases/download/0.17.0/Chocola... Is the latest release. It has the familiar “Click and installer asks for UAC and magic happens in background”. That Pedro may be looking for as well. Afterwards you just check the box for Haskell-dev and click install. If you want GHC 8.6.5, you click the all versions button and install that. Haskell-dev is nothing but a wrapper to Install msys2, ghc and cabal. Select those 3 components and you get the same thing. So whether you install Haskell-dev and then downgrade to GHC 8.6.5 or you install GHC 8.6.5 + msys2, both should work Tamar From: lonetiger@gmail.com Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2020 10:20 To: Jack Kelly Cc: dreixel@gmail.com; haskell Subject: RE: [Haskell-cafe] When did it become so hard to installHaskellonWindows? Hi Jack, What made it remarkably tough for students to set up on their machines? You can still use Haskell-dev if you want older GHCs. Just install it and then Downgrade the ghc. I would be quite interested to figure out what the pain points were. Surely if they are new to Windows they would have come from a platform where they know what a package manager is. Would providing a binary to automate the steps work for you? I have been reluctant to do so because I don’t want to hide what the installer is doing. Thanks, Tamar Sent from Mail for Windows 10 From: Jack Kelly Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2020 10:15 To: lonetiger@gmail.com Cc: dreixel@gmail.com; haskell Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] When did it become so hard to install HaskellonWindows? I appreciate that these things are standard tools for Windows developers, but it's worth noting how much harder it can make things for completely new people (either new developers or new to Windows). At the start of the year, I prepared install instructions for university students who would be using Haskell as part of a first year CS course. We needed to use GHC 8.6.5 because certain libraries were not available for GHC 8.8.x (their base upper bounds hadn't updated, which ruled out haskell-dev), and tried to use Chocolatey as an experiment. It was remarkably tough to get students set up on their own machines. I was planning on recommending the Haskell Platform installer for Semester 2 this year, and am disappointed to find that it no longer exists. If it becomes too hard for students to install Haskell on their own Windows machines, it may become too hard for us to use Haskell as an educational tool, and I'd consider that a tragedy. -- Jack writes:

Hi Pedro,

I’m the maintainer of those chocolatey packages.

➢ First, I have to subscribe to a newsletter? Really? I guess this is entirely optional, but the instructions don't make it sound so.

Step 1 is completely optional and you don’t have to subscribe to any news letter.

➢ Then I have to know what powershell.exe is, use an administrative prompt, and enter scary commands in it.

Powershell has been the standard shell in Windows for well over the past decade. Every single script from Microsoft or third parties come with powershell for automation. It’s understandable that you may not know it since your primary platform isn’t Windows. But it’s been included in every single Windows version for the past 13 years.

An administrative prompt is nothing different than running sudo or clicking on that installer that you *assumed* not to be scary because you didn’t see the actions it was performing. That scary looking command is nothing but a curl command allowing the one time execution of a script from a remote source. As in a script that’s not physically on your machine.

So what exactly makes this scary? Is it because

Set-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Scope Process -Force; [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol = [System.Net.ServicePointManager]::SecurityProtocol -bor 3072; iex ((New-Object System.Net.WebClient).DownloadString('https://chocolatey.org/install.ps1'))

Is more verbose than

curl -sSL https://path.to.some.script/ | sh

or because the technologies used while completely standard on Windows aren’t known to the casual user?

Thanks, Tamar

From: José Pedro Magalhães Sent: Saturday, April 25, 2020 04:24 To: haskell Subject: [Haskell-cafe] When did it become so hard to install Haskell onWindows?

Hi,

I haven't used Haskell in my personal computer in a while. I decided to install it again. I used the Haskell Platform in the past, so I went for that again - and a quick Google search on "install haskell windows" brings up the HP page, so I thought I was on the right track.

At the HP page for Windows, I'm greeted with this:

In the past I'd just download an installer which would take care of things - now it seems to be more complicated. But fine, I followed the link to configure Chocolatey. That's where it starts getting really scary:

First, I have to subscribe to a newsletter? Really? I guess this is entirely optional, but the instructions don't make it sound so. Then I have to know what powershell.exe is, use an administrative prompt, and enter scary commands in it.

I gave up at this stage. But going back to the HP page, it appears that even this wouldn't be enough, because I would still need to follow "the instructions at haskellstack.org to install stack". The link to haskellstack.org takes me to a 403 Forbidden.

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.

Thanks, Pedro

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