Hi all, Jan has my full support -- I'm just one of these beginners, meaning I have tried several attempts to get started with Haskell and gave up after fighting some days with cabal. Currently I give stack a shot and have no other system GHC installed. This works very nicely for me and I have not encountered any problems. I would be really happy with seeing this approach supported by the whole ecosystem. Cheers, Friedrich On 29.08.2016 16:43, Jan Gerlinger wrote:
Hi all,
I believe haskell.org and its download section should be directed to total beginners and they should not be confronted with multiple choices.
As someone who has personally seen people willing to learn Haskell give up, because they were burnt by the global package database, I think any global persistent state should be avoided in the tools recommended. This especially concerns all packages installed globally by default by HP. Cabal's default workflow (currently and probably for a long time in the future) also installs packages globally and is thus harmful for beginners, as they are not able to resolve conflicts and errors.
This leaves me with Stack or a Minimal HP stripped down to only consist of GHC and Stack. Since a global GHC is not needed when using Stack and telling people to use `stack ghci` instead of `ghci` is absolutely no problem in my experience, I would go with Stack.
To summarise:
* haskell.org download section should cater to total beginners.
* Giving multiple options is actively harmful, there should only be one.
* Minimal HP is the wrong choice for this option. Stack is.
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