April 2016 - Haskell-community

Request for comment: New haskell.org download page
by John Wiegley 12 Jul '16

12 Jul '16

As mentioned earlier, I've been working on a draft version of the new Haskell download page in consultation with Simon PJ, Michael Snoyman, and Gershom Bazerman. The goal has been twofold: a) add stack as an explicit option, and b) add text to each option indicating clearly what it provides and where to get further help, so users can understand the options and make an informed choice. We've sought to keep the text factual, rather than imply that one option is "best" for any particular class of user, since opinions vary so widely on this point. At the following link, you'll find a draft version of the new page for comment: https://gist.github.com/jwiegley/153d968ddfc9046ee4c9 Hopefully it can go live on haskell.org next week, so please contribute your edits here, or by pull request. The goal is to explain each option so that people can make an informed decision. However, the order of presentation does imply that whatever comes first is "preferred" even if that is not the intent. The order currently given is HP, Stack, Minimal. Chris has already made a few points about changing this order, so let's continue that discussion and see where it leads us. Bear in mind that this is (hopefully) only an interim state. The plan is to add Stack to the Platform, and render the Platform minimal, which will consolidate this page down to a single, recommended download path. At the bottom of the gist are incomplete sections on third party libraries and alternate installation approaches. These have yet to be written. The hope is to resolve the top content first and sort the rest out after; however, ideas for that content is most welcome too. Thank you, John Wiegley

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On the design used for haskell.org
by Christopher Done 02 May '16

02 May '16

[Re-sending to the curiously conceived haskell-community list.] Hello, It's been two years (2014) since I published my design ( http://chrisdone.com/posts/haskell-lang) which came about because I wasn't happy with what was on haskell.org and how it was maintained. After that I was approached about using my design for haskell.org, I wasn't thrilled about handing over my work to be committee'd to death, and was initially shocked into nearly giving up on the whole business, but was turned around for the good of the Haskell community in general. In the end my fast horse, having waded through months of officialism, became a camel. It took one year. One year for the actual site to be deployed (2015) and now in 2016 it's still lacking clear coherent vision. I applied to be a committee member which wasn't considered worthy of reply. And since 2014 I've lost any energy in dealing with "the committee". So I'm going on record that I don't approve of the current haskell.org, nor your use of my design, and would like haskell.org to be reset to what you had before; the wiki. I don't expect much to happen (as usual), but that's kind of the point. Going our separate ways, Ciao!

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addition of http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/ to haskell website resources?
by Julian Leviston 25 Apr '16

25 Apr '16

Hi Adam et al, Please feel free to ask us any questions you’d like, and thanks for the kind words. Volume 1 is actually finished (available on Leanpub, but we haven’t put it up entirely on our website yet, we’re releasing chapters there gradually to build interest). We’re in progress with Volume 2 as we speak and we don’t plan on abandoning this work any time soon. We're planning to keep it (and subsequent volumes) online as long as possible, and as up to date and relevant as possible. Our work is very much aimed at absolute beginners with the aim of using interesting topics to drive learning rather than Haskell’s features, which by themselves aren’t necessarily compelling enough to provide drive to learn Haskell. Having said this, we’re working on more volumes to bring the more interesting of the Haskell topics within the reach of the beginner (you might notice volume 1 really only just touches the surface of Haskell and its more interesting and useful capabilities, and we haven’t really begun with the level of exercises we’d like to bring to bear on it). Thanks! :) Julian and Rich (GetContented) > [Haskell-community] addition of http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/ to haskell website resources? > > Adam Foltzer acfoltzer at gmail.com <mailto:haskell-community%40haskell.org?Subject=Re%3A%20%5BHaskell-community…> > Mon Apr 25 18:06:51 UTC 2016 > I'd not come across this before; at first glance, it looks like a good > resource for beginners. The lack of clear authorship makes me a bit > uncomfortable, though, since it's optionally available as a paid purchase. > FWIW, the GetContented username has only been around on reddit for 3 > months. I wouldn't want to end up in a situation where we're recommending a > paid product that might very well disappear before the book is finished, > even if we're only linking to the free version. > > Perhaps we could tentatively plan to add it to the Books section on the > documentation page, but ask the author for more details first? > > On Mon, Apr 25, 2016 at 8:04 AM, Gershom B <gershomb at gmail.com <http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-community>> wrote: > > > There’s been a pull request open to add > > http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/ <http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/> to the website under > > /documentation > > > > I haven’t read it myself all the way through. It does look like it has > > developed a fair amount of material by now. Do people think it should be > > added as a tutorial? > > > > —Gershom > > > >

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addition of http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/ to haskell website resources?
by Gershom B 25 Apr '16

25 Apr '16

There’s been a pull request open to add http://www.happylearnhaskelltutorial.com/ to the website under /documentation I haven’t read it myself all the way through. It does look like it has developed a fair amount of material by now. Do people think it should be added as a tutorial? —Gershom

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Start thinking about system installation for users Maybe?
by Cynede 22 Apr '16

22 Apr '16

There are known problems which developers regularry face with cabal-install and stack brings easier and safer workflow for developers, that's true. But I don't see how stack can help developers to understand other aspects When haskellers talk about user installation they really mean sandbox When haskellers talk about global installation they mean user installation When haskellers talk about system installation their brains blows People complain that on Haskell.org there is harmful workflow for developers introducing Haskell Platform and it should be overtaken by stack. (Note that Haskell Platform is system installation used by different users and it can't be messed up with user installation) However either `cabal-install` and `stack` worklows are both harmful for users, `stack` does resolve nothing for user side, it just helps you with sandbox managing during development stage. I will try to explain. Regularly users use package managers (on windows installers) to get what they want, that's how users install python projects, C++ projects, etc... users don't use pip (really they don't) What about haskell? On most distributions and Windows users should use what? sandboxes for every program and install those progam for every users avoiding system installation? Currently yes. Other ways will be harmful. There is solution from NixOS but I doubt if they've managed to implement revdep rebuild for haskell packages. I like (a lot) solution from gentoo where you can simply run `emerge idris` and everything will be installed on system alike you install some python util (alike portage itself). But even in Gentoo there is dirty hack to manage haskell packages updates. it looks really dirty haskell-updater -- --jobs="$(($(nproc) + 1))" --verbose-conflicts --backtrack=100 haskell-updater -- --jobs="$(($(nproc) + 1))" --verbose-conflicts --backtrack=100 basically it's rebuilding all libs depending on changed one then depending on depending incrementally What is it even? Haskell programs and libraries extensively reuse entitites (types, functions, rewrite rules, type instances, other stuff) exported from external libraries as non-opaque entities to allow aggressive cross-module inlining to compile away deep layers of abstraction. It’s language’s feature. If you accept the fact transitive dependencies being able to break ABI is not a GHC bug what actually affects real ABI (exported inlines, exported datatype layout changes, modules names, strictness annotations, unpack pragmas) ghc –show-iface can help in tracking ABI drift. So in nutshell it's a feature but when we're fixing linkage for C/C++ we can scan libs for missing shared library dependencies and attempts to fix them by rebuilding broken libs For haskell we hardly can detect ABI changes and the only way I know currently is `haskell-updater` util and I'm still looking for better solution For example when one project, for example Idris, start using changed (bumped) library which is shipped with GHC it feels absolutely fine on sandbox But when user will install idris (and that library to system) all other libraries will become broken because their dependencies is changed by that That’s why some core packages has -compat compatibility layers Sure developers tell me that they don’t care and everything works fine in sandboxes and downgrading this library is distro-patch Note that currently either cabal-install and stack has nothing to do with atomic packages managing. Package manager can install, can remove, can update, can track dependies changes and end with working environment without sandbox replacing. Honestly it's very same situation with python or perl with only difference... When I install software written on python I don't need to use `pip` and `Haskell` seems like much harder to package but people everywhere only force you to use really wrong solutions (including community loved stack) So my question is generally to community: are we even going to think in direction of users or are we just focus on developers and their sandboxes? In second case we need docker for each Haskell project. Thanks for your attnetion, it's my first post to this mailing list and sorry for my horrible English Heather

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ANN: New Haskell.org committee members
by John Wiegley 21 Apr '16

21 Apr '16

The Haskell.org committee has selected its new member following the March self-nomination period. The new (returning) member is: * Gershom Bazerman Thank you to everyone who submitted a self-nomination. Note that if you have self-nominated in the past, but not been picked, please self-nominate again in the future. -- John Wiegley GPG fingerprint = 4710 CF98 AF9B 327B B80F http://newartisans.com 60E1 46C4 BD1A 7AC1 4BA2

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