On Mon, Mar 23, 2015 at 11:20 AM, Anthony Cowley wrote:

I don't understand this attitude. You say that neither new users nor package authors agree with your stance on the HP, so you want to force their hands. Presumably package authors know what they're doing for themselves, and the majority of evidence we have is that new users who stick with the language do not like the way the HP works https://reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2zts44/wither_the_platform/.

No, this is not what I said. I was explaining that it rather difficult, even if we wanted to force their hands, to imagine that we could do so. I will say that I do not share your belief that package authors know what they are doing, in general. If they did, I would imagine that nearly all packages would ensure they would work with the current platform. But getting programmers to all agree on something like that is herding cats, and all it takes is a few people saying "feh on the platform" but nonetheless producing otherwise good packages that come into widespread use to _in general_ mean that many packages which directly or indirectly want to use those dependencies must also now split off from support for the platform. So I agree that people have voted with their feet, and we need to catch up to that. In fact, it seems to me from this discussion that there are only _two_ things we need to do to make the platform the recommended install path for all platforms again: 1) Incorporate the improvements to windows builds that have been pioneered by the MinGHC project (in particular so that platform-installed windows ghc can build the network package properly, and perhaps even the GL stuff). 2) Address the problem that in a sandbox you will get a different install plan depending on your global package db. I would suggest this be done by setting a default preference of the sandbox to ignore global packages, and allow that to be overridden with an easily configurable flag or setting or the like. That way, new users can pay the longer compile price for a guaranteed-safer experience, and more experienced users can choose to use / build up a broader library of packages they can share across sandboxes. (Certainly some "nix-like tricks" in cabal could also help address the repeated builds problem, but a flag can be implemented much more quickly as a short-term measure). All that said, I think it would _still_ be better if more package authors paid attention to backwards-compatibility across releases, and it would _still_ be better for new users if they didn't go off and bash their heads against the newest and least stable packages around. But that is indeed a different problem. Cheers, Gershom