Hi
Nice theory, but this doesn't work at all in practice: The majority of the packages mentioned so far are not purely Haskell, so one needs tons of development tools and C libraries, headers, etc. (all in a consistent state, of course) to compile those packages, which is a bit tricky on *nices and a huge task on WinDoze.
I believe its spelt Windows :) GHC ships with a large chunk of gcc and assorted stuff on Windows, and you can happily use GHC to compile up C programs.
And there might even be packages where Joe User can't get the development tools without signing an NDA...
I'm not convinced a project that is open source should be shipping things that people can't build, kind of goes against the whole open source thing, and is just plain annoying.
* A set of highly modularized, small, separate installers for GHC/core packages and each non-core package. * As an alternative, a "sumo"/"omnibus"/<whatever you call it> installer containing everything from the central darcs repo, plus probably even more. This can have the option to install only a subset of the contained packages. The best option would of course be some kind of "net installer", just like Cygwin's setup.exe, but this is of course something for the future.
Once cabal/hackage is finished, something like this probably becomes quite easly to do - so it might not be that far in the future.
Meanwhile, the first set of small installers should make people happy which have only a limited amount of disk space and a slow internet connection, while the "sumo" installer should make people with modern machines and high-speed ADSL/cable-modem/T1 more happy. Let's not forget that we live in a world where patches regularly exceed 100MB, downloadable game demos are >1GB and disks with >200GB are common even in cheap new computers. In such a setting, it is hard to argue that it is "much better" to surf the Net for an hour to get all the packages one wants instead of downloading and installing everything in a single click within minutes...
Just because I have a fast machine, doesn't mean I want to spend all the time downloading GHC. And people now have a fast net connection and can bittorrent movies all day, making hard disk space precious once more. I agree with Bulat that its sensible to try and keep some focus towards small and light, since those are things that impress developers, which is our target market. Thanks Neil _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
