Exactly my thoughts. With all the love I have for Stack, if you want to just run ghc(i), you wouldn't be able to do so after installing stack. You'd need to:

1. run `stack setup`
2. edit your PATH to point wherever ghc(i) is installed

And these aren't even clear out of current instructions for a newbie.

So, for me, ideal option would be: Minimal which always provides stack (and recommends it for managing projects). Before that happens, I voted for "stack minimal HP" way, because it's better to learn how stack works than to fall into "I don't have stack, I don't want to waste my time on it, let's just use everything global" way.

On Fri, Sep 25, 2015 at 10:10 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com> wrote:
On 24/09/2015 18:23, John Wiegley wrote:
Michael Snoyman <michael@fpcomplete.com> writes:

Secondly, I'd like to make clear what I think the goal for the downloads
page should be: new users. Experienced Haskellers are unlikely to even visit
this downloads page, and are likely well aware of the situation around
tooling to make an informed decision regardless of what this page says. I'd
like us to constrain discussion to "what's best for a new user." I haven't
heard anyone object to this idea before.

I couldn't agree more, Michael. The new user is first in my mind with all of
this.

Perhaps we need a poll. So far the presented options are:

     1. HP       Stack    Minimal
     2. Stack    HP       Minimal
     3. Stack    Minimal  HP
     4. Minimal  HP       Stack
     5. Minimal  Stack    HP

I'll open voting at the current state, choosing #4. My reason is that HP and
Stack will soon merge, and I'm willing to put Minimal first based on
Christopher's and Gershom's arguments.

Further, the reason HP is staying on the list for now is that I'd prefer not
to conflate issues. I'm happy to start a new discussion, recommending to the
committee that we remove HP, if others wish to.

 I think it would be strange to download and install Haskell from the download page and then not be able to type "ghci" and get a prompt, or use ghc to compile some code.  I appreciate that there are now a lot of users and use cases that just don't use Haskell this way, but there are also a lot who do.  We won't be able to figure out the relative size of these two groups easily, and I suspect a vote/poll is likely to give misleading results.  But since there are few downsides to the minimal installer for those who want to use Stack, that seems like the best overall choice.

Hence, #4/#5 for me equally.

Ideally the Linux minimal installer would include Stack too, for consistency and so that we don't have to have the explicit special-case text on the download page.

Cheers
Simon

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