ghcup-hs/README.md

ghcup

A rewrite of ghcup in haskell.

TODO

• create static ghcup binaries
  • adjust url in GHCupDownloads
• add print-system-reqs command

Motivation

Maintenance problems:

• platform incompatibilities regularly causing breaking bugs:
  • Mktemp not working properly on macOS
  • ln: illegal option -- T on macOS Catalina
  • Wrong tar flag on darwin)
• refactoring being difficult due to POSIX sh

Benefits of a rewrite:

• Features such as installing release candidates or HEAD builds can be more conveniently implemented in a rewrite
• Refactoring will be easier
• Better tool support (such as linting the downloads file)
• saner downloads file format (such as JSON)

Downsides:

• building static binaries for all platforms (and possibly causing SSL/DNS problems)
• still bootstrapping those binaries via a POSIX sh script

Goals

• Correct low-level code
• Good exception handling
• Cleaner user interface