Dear Haskell Platform team, Congratulations on the release!
I just installed from source (on Debian Wheezy) and have some feedback that I would like to share. 1. I do not think that installing into /usr/local/haskell is good organization because it mixes Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) directories (bin, lib, share, etc.) with non-FHS directories (haskell in this case, but go is another example). I install local software into a /usr/local/opt directory, since such usage is analogous to that of /opt (and reserve /opt itself for package-managed content). I wrote about this in more detail here: http://www.extellisys.com/articles/usr-local-opt One can always use the "--prefix" option when building from source, of course. 2. Until now, I have installed minimal Haskell installations into directories named like /usr/local/opt/ghc-7.6.3 and Haskell Platform installations into directories named like /usr/local/opt/ghc-7.6.3-2013.2.0.0. The new Haskell Platform build system is hard-coded with the ghc-x.y.z-arch convention, however. I can work with it by using that convention for my Haskell Platform installations and a different one (such as ghc-x.y.z-arch-min) for my minimal installations. I think that it would be preferable, however, to not force specific installation paths on users. 3. The activate-hs script creates symbolic links as well as registers packages. In my environments, I do not create symbolic links, which alters the system environment. I want Haskell software installed by the package manager into /usr to use the packaged Haskell tools (which have the necessary packages available), not my development installations (which have minimal global packages since I use sandboxes), but /usr/local/bin is [generally] before /usr/bin in the system PATH. My Haskell development environments activate a development installation by changing the PATH instead. I think that this method is preferable because it is environment specific: it only affects a single shell, and it does not affect the system or other users. The method also allows easy testing software with many versions of GHC/HP without updating links. This method supersedes the symbolic links anyway, but perhaps the activate-hs script encourages a bad practice. Would it be a good idea to make the symbolic link creation optional? Another option would be to let users link local packages themselves using GNU Stow. A benefit of using GNU Stow is that it supports unlinking, allowing users to easily uninstall linked, local packages. I recognize that my usage is not mainstream, but I am emailing in hope that my feedback might be helpful anyway. Thanks and best regards, Travis _______________________________________________ Haskell-platform mailing list Haskell-platform@projects.haskell.org http://projects.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-platform