tackle some shell scripting...

[Mark Lentczner]

While the recommended path for linux installation is use the systems'
distribution repos to install the haskell platform package from there....
it can take quite a bit of time from the release of the platform to the
point where those packages get built and accepted into the release repo for
a linux distribution.

The last Platform I included an alternative "bindist" style tarball, and a
script, activate-hs, that allows people to mostly "just untar and go".

But, it leaves somethings things to be desired:

   - People don't like untar'ing at / - even if the tarball was just a
   script and an inner tarball, and that "installer" script did the untar'ing
   at /, people would feel a lot more comfortable. Especially if that
   installer script did some sanity checks.
   - The activate-hs script could do a fair bit more checking it's actions
   than it does now.

If you have a hankering to do some imperative shell scripting in the name
of functional programming, this is just the ticket!

Speaking of tickets, here are some from the Issues list:

   - activate-hs does not handle all errors
   <https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/issues/178>
   - activate-hs creates broken symlinks on Linux
   <https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/issues/158>
   - failure of symLinkInto, if not exists $prefix/share/man/man1
   <https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/issues/133>
   - Linux binary installer does not check for required C libs (apparently)
   <https://github.com/haskell/haskell-platform/issues/145>

The first three have fixes alread in the pre-release branch... but they
could be better I bet.

- Mark
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