The choice boils down to whether you want stack to manage your GHC installation or not.

I personally find it distasteful.  This has been the biggest blocker for me using stack, it wants to control more of my workflow than I want to give it, leading to an overlap of responsibilities. 

(I do use stack, but only with external GHC installations, and I often get into a mess when it tries to download another GHC)

Having said that, is it better for new users to delegate the GHC installation to stack?  I don't know.  It certainly has the downside that you can't just type "ghci" and get a prompt.

The world seems simpler when it consists of

- GHC installations

- build tools that use your GHC installations and manage local package building

But when my build tool manages my GHC installations, there's now a layer of abstraction in the way of GHC and I can't figure out how to interact directly with GHC any more.  Also I can't use cabal (which I often do).

So, I'd argue for HP minimal to be the default download option.  By all means recommend stack as the default build tool - I'm sure it's less problematic for most people to get Stackage by default, and cabal isn't set up to use Stackage out of the box.

Can't we get rid of HP Full?  I don't see a use for that any more.

Cheers

Simon

On 29 August 2016 at 16:29, Nicolas Wu <nicolas.wu@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello,

I think having multiple options is confusing to beginners, and so I'd like to see a single download option on the download page. 

For me it's important that we have a way for beginners to use tools like ghc and ghci on the command line directly in order to run small throw-away programs.

The decision about how to manage projects and their dependencies should be open and isn't for beginners, whether that be using stack or cabal: both have their merits, and I don't want to push one over the other. The default installation should provide both of these as well as other tools core to building ghc.

As such, I'm in favour of having the HP as the only option.

Nick

On Sat, Aug 27, 2016 at 5:50 AM Jason Dagit <dagitj@gmail.com> wrote:

Hello all,

I just realized that the Minimal installer listed first on the Downloads page (https://www.haskell.org/downloads) is deprecated and "dead". This creates an unfortunate situation where our top suggested way to get haskell immediately tells the user it's dead.

I think that we should remove mention of the minimal installer ASAP on the grounds that the HP now comes in minimal and full variants.

Furthermore, I would like to make the recommendation that we list the HP above other methods as even the minimal HP installer ships with stack (at least on windows it does).

Between the two changes, I think the first one is crucial and the second one is merely reasonable.

Thanks,

Jason

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