"Owners" needed for the "alternative installation options"

[tomjaguarpaw]

It would be great to have "owners" for each of the "alternative installation options" (listed below). That is, for each alternative installation option there should be someone who is responsible for making sure that installation option is specified clearly, works, and is kept up to date. If we can't find an owner for an installation option then I suggest we remove that installation option because (a) lack of owner probably implies the option is not very popular anyway and (b) the information is likely to get outdated and broken, causing more harm than good.

If anyone has any thoughts then please comment here. Unless the discussion here suggests otherwise, after a week or two I'll add tickets for each installation option, to find an owner or remove the option. Once we have those tickets we can post widely on the usual Haskell channels to find volunteer owners.

Current alternative installation options

• Linux Ubuntu (confusing (see First linux download link doesn't work / is confusing #16) and probably outdated)
• Linux Debian (links to https://downloads.haskell.org/~debian/ which doesn't support Debian 11 Bullseye)
• Linux Fedora
• Linux EPEL for RHEL/CentOS/etc
• Linux Arch
• Linux openSUSE Leap
• Linux openSUSE Tumbleweed
• Linux Gentoo
• Windows Chocolatey

[tomjaguarpaw]

It may also be useful to bear in mind a ranking of most popular Linux distributions, such as the ranking from DistroWatch.

[jaspervdj]

We discussed this during the Haskell.org meeting and we would prefer to significantly shorten the alternative installation options, or remove it entirely.

[tomjaguarpaw]

OK, so if anyone has any strong feelings about continuing to present "alternative installation options" please speak up, especially if you can help us support them with your expertise!

I will also circulate this on Haskell Discourse at some point to widen the debate.

[tomjaguarpaw]

Posted to

• Discourse
• Reddit
• Twitter
• Haskell Cafe

[Pitometsu]

Just keep nix, please.

[Ericson2314]

CC @Mistuke for Chocolatey. I of course like Nix too.

I am thinking it would be better to condense this section then cull it. I don't like the trend of languages making their own *up and so don't feel great about steering people towards it.

With the upcoming work on the GHCJS and Asterius upstreaming, and recent developments like https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/5965 I think the following will be true:

• Stack and ghcup will increasing by overkill, as cabal build ghc and stack build ghc just work, and the right solution is to think about caching builds for arbitrary packages rather than special-casing GHC.

• Hopefully more web development / cross compilation will mean that the "single target platform" GHCs than stack and ghcup give one are underpowered and insufficient anyways.

So while I am very sympathetic with the idea of cleaning up this page, and in particular don't dispute these truths:

• the page is an awkward verbose compromise to broker peace between various factions
• ghcup and stack are indeed the most popular options right now

I think culling the alternatives right now would be skating to the where the puck is currently, not skating to where the puck is going.

[tomjaguarpaw]

I think culling the alternatives right now would be skating to the where the puck is currently, not skating to where the puck is going.

That's OK, once the puck has demonstrably gone somewhere we can skate there after it!. I don't think this puck moves especially quickly!

[tomjaguarpaw]

Regarding nix, what we have at the moment is

nix: a popular cross-distro package manager, aiming to provide reproducible builds and declarative configuration

That's unlikely to go out of date, but not very helpful either. Nix folk presumably already know how to get Haskell. On the other hand we have a lot of Nix expertise in the Haskell community, so maybe someone will step up to write and maintain a Nix alternative installation option.

[pwm]

That's unlikely to go out of date, but not very helpful either. Nix folk presumably already know how to get Haskell. On the other hand we have a lot of Nix expertise in the Haskell community, so maybe someone will step up to write and maintain a Nix alternative installation option.

I maintain nixkell a small haskell-nix installer/skeleton. I'm not saying it should go on haskell.org but I agree that a Nix installation should be there given the sizeable intersection of the two communities. Also whatever ends up on there should be better than what is currently there, which I agree is not helpful at all.

[tomjaguarpaw]

a Nix installation should be there given the sizeable intersection of the two communities

The way I see it is, if there is sizeable support for a particular option then someone will step up to be an official owner of it. I hope someone will do so for a nix installation method. @pwm, if enough people like your nixkell, then perhaps that could be it! I'm happy to hear about other alternatives.

[TikhonJelvis]

Just keep nix, please.

What does recommending Nix on the Haskell website accomplish? I am a very active Nix and NixOS user myself, and I still don't think a note about Nix on the Haskell downloads page would be useful.

When somebody comes to the downloads page, I see two cases: either they already use Nix, or they don't.

If somebody already uses Nix, they don't need a note on the downloads page. They might need (better) documentation about how to use Nix for Haskell—but that's something that needs to live in the Nix world. From our point of view, it isn't even clear where to link! (The Nix/Nixpkgs manual? The Nixpkgs Haskell documentation? Haskell.nix? The Nix wiki?)

If somebody isn't using Nix yet, we don't want to recommend it just to get Haskell. The downloads page is primarily useful for beginners, so picking Nix up just to install Haskell would be taking on two steep learning curves simultaneously! Grappling with Nix when you just want to do some Haskell—you don't care about learning Nix for its own sake— could easily turn a beginner off Nix or even off Haskell.

So what does that leave us? What's the profile of a visitor to haskell.org for whom a note about Nix would be useful?

For what it's worth, I also think this is true for most specific distro documentation. Arch/Gentoo/SUSE/etc¹ users don't need distro-specific installation instructions; they'll either use non-distro-specific tools or rely on their own tools and documentation. I see a reasonable case for instructions on Ubuntu or Homebrew because those are de facto default tools that beginners use without much specific knowledge or experience, but Nix today is pretty much the opposite of that.

Footnotes

1. Arch + Haskell is a bit of a special case because it might make sense to actively recommend that Arch users don't get anything Haskell-specific from Arch—but the Downloads page doesn't seem like the right place for that either! ↩

[tomjaguarpaw]

f-a on Discourse points out that Nix is used as much as ghcup according to the Haskell Survey.

[Ericson2314]

Yeah I agree @TikhonJelvis that haskell.org boosting Nix isn't important. It's more like I feel haskell.org is implicitly saying "don't trust your system package manager" that irks me. Traditional distros being terrible leading to every language developing its own branded "*up" tool is an easily understood state of affairs.

That's why I would prefer a more general vague wording that just admits there are alternatives, warns in some cases they will give you out of date stuff, but also says in other cases they won't mand might come with their own benefits.

I just want to start to descalate the disto vs language cold war, and keep door open to a better future.

[tomjaguarpaw]

That's why I would prefer a more general vague wording that just admits there are alternatives, warns in some cases they will give you out of date stuff, but also says in other cases they won't mand might come with their own benefits.

Could you be more concrete about some wording you would like to see?