Re: [wxhaskell-users] problems buiding wxHaskell on Windows

[Heinrich A. <apf...@qu...>]

Antton Tapani wrote:
> Installer would indeed be very nice, but it takes a lot of work to
> create and maintain universal installer and it would currently benefit
> only a handful of  people. I'm guessing the majority of wxhaskell
> users are fairly savvy developers, so it would not seem worth the
> trouble. That of course quickly becomes self fulfilling statement
> since it will actively drive away people who have no interest in
> fiddling with the nuances of the installation process. They may give
> it a try, but fail and give up and you never hear from them.
> 
> I will devote some time on this if I end up using haskell on more
> projects. Most people who wish to use wxhaskell are not likely to
> participate in its development, but at the same time people are less
> willing to develop a library with only few users. Haskell platform
> itself is pretty much single click installation, and it is very easy
> to get started with. Ideally that should be the case with every gui
> toolkit as well.

[Cross posting to the libraries list.]

Actually, maybe it's possible to integrate the creation of one-click 
installers with the Haskell Platform efforts?

The best option would be to have wxHaskell to become part of the 
platform, but it probably doesn't meet the criteria for inclusion right 
now. But the focus is on the underlying C libraries anyway, these are 
the things that are tricky to install.

Of course, someone has to prepare an installer, this amount of work 
doesn't magically disappear. But maybe it's a good idea to share common 
infrastructure, resources and knowledge with the Haskell Platform 
effort? Things that can be shared are:

* the guy with the hat on top (release manager) who prods people to stay 
in sync
* testing infrastructure (I have this romantic image where the Haskell 
Platforms hackers have access to a vast cloud of virtual machines to 
test their installation on different systems)
* shell scripts for automating the creation of installers. (I for one 
have no clue how to create an installer on MacOS X.)


So, the idea would be to have several installers: the Haskell Platform 
as a basis and then several "Pillars" on top, for instance the "GUI 
Pillar" that includes binaries for wxHaskell and GTK, or a "Web Pillar" 
that collects several web packages as soon as they become tricky to 
install with cabal ("yesod platform"). The latter should probably be a 
user install, not a global one.


Best regards,
Heinrich Apfelmus

--
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