On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 5:51 PM, Mark Lentczner <[email protected]> wrote: > On Wed, May 29, 2013 at 4:59 PM, Jason Dagit <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> I expect it would be different in the way that anything installed as >> part of the platform is different: It's a blessed version and part of >> a coherent set of packages. > > > But as an add-on pack, why not just publish WxHaskell-Stable with a set of > .cabal constraints that tie it to a particular HP version? There really > isn't anything "blessed" by being in the HP - it is just a stable set that > the individual package maintainers pick. No reason the WxHaskell maintainers > can't do the same.
If the wxHaskell team created a 3rd party HP add-on that might work. It would be even better if the HP acknowledged that add-on and steered beginners towards it. Trying to respond to this, I run smack into the question of, "Well, what value does/should the HP provide?" For me, the HP could provide just ghc and cabal-install and I'd be happy. Then again, I don't consider myself part of the target audience. I think people who want to get started with Haskell, and have something simple but full featured to install, are the audience. Would you agree? My impression is that the primary value of the HP is in having the HP sign off on things so that newcomers have some clue as to what packages to get started with. The secondary value being the convenient packaging itself. > I've heard this argument before for inclusion of something in the Platform - > and I don't understand it. The platform has no secret sauce for making > things installable. If the Gtk2hs team can't find a way to make installing > Gtk2hs easy, the Platform team certainly isn't going to be able to figure it > out! It's about reducing duplication and making things convenient for the masses (the secondary value of the HP as I put it above). If the HP team can get, say, Gtk2hs built in a redistributable way, then (the logic goes) it would be nice to reuse that effort instead of forcing users to reproduce a non-trivial to configure build environment. This probably doesn't apply to linux where software tends to not be very redistributable. In some ways it's like the difference between gentoo and debian. There are pros/cons to both approaches (gentoo vs. debian), and for some (most?) users being able to install a prebuilt binary is a huge win. Jason _______________________________________________ Haskell-platform mailing list [email protected] http://projects.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-platform
