ghcup-hs/README.md

ghcup

A rewrite of ghcup in haskell. This can be used as a library and may be redistributed as a binary in the future.

Motivation

ghcup has increasingly become difficult to maintain. A few reasons:

• few maintainers
• increasing LOC
• 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

More 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)

However, the downside will be:

• 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
• Easier user interface (possibly interactive and non-interactive ones)