packaging options for Mac OS X

[John Lato]

On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 7:46 AM, Gregory Collins <greg at gregorycollins.net>wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 24, 2010 at 6:58 AM, Mark Lentczner <markl at glyphic.com> wrote:
>
>
Thanks for agreeing to take on this very important responsibility.  And
thanks also to Greg for all the work he's contributed to get us to this
point.


> >
> > 1) Deliver the GHC installer package, but with a different postinstall
> script that downloads, compiles and installs the Haskell Platform. (!) This
> would be essentially the build.sh script from the Haskell Platform repo.
>
> I think it would be better to bundle them.
>

Strongly agree.  I sometimes want to install the HP on a computer that's not
networked; having a bundle is really nice for this.


> > 2) Like #1, but include the source trees or tarballs of all the haskell
> packages in the installer package, and have the build.sh script build from
> those sources.
> >
> > 1&2 Result in only one framework (GHC) being installed on the Mac, and
> the H.P. haskell packages are just managed by ghc-pkg & cabal just like any
> other haskell packages the user installs. Further, while these take longer
> to install, they guarantee that the packages are built in a way best for the
> user's system.
>
> I think most users would prefer binaries but this would eliminate a
> whole class of problems.


Binaries should be provided, if for no other reason than new users can get
started much more quickly.  If I want to try out Haskell, and I have to wait
a half hour (just guessing) for the installer to build everything, I'm going
to get bored and probably figure "why bother?"

Also, the HP is already distributed as source.  Would a mac-specific version
differ significantly from the basic source package?  If so, it should
probably be distributed anyway.

John
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://projects.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-platform/attachments/20101124/748938cb/attachment.htm