{5} Assigned, Active Tickets by Owner (Full Description) (15 matches)

Claus Reinke has proposed:

The idea is simply to have a single dated news item that lists current and next release versions, either with date or with reasons for delays, and to add a link to the release timetable for more detailed information (since the platform logo is used elsewhere, it might be good to provide a variant with automatically overlaid version number).

• http://projects.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-platform/2010-May/000972.html

In particular,

More generally, could the current status of the platform please be made *obvious early* on its webpages? Currently, a visit looking for such info might go like this:

1. http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/

doesn't say anything about versions or timelines

2. http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/contents.html

gives GHC versions, without linking them to HP versions or timelines

3. http://hackage.haskell.org/platform/windows.html

lists current version and timeline of older versions (good), but does not state that the current version is a beta, nor does it indicate that there is a stable version due, or what problems are keeping the beta from becoming stable

4. http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Haskell_Platform

does not offer much info, but seems to be the only page linking to

5. http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/

no current version info, release time table is only for package maintainers, none of the "open bug reports" has a 2010.x milestone

6. http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/ReleaseTimetable

THERE!-) This is the information I was looking for, at least part of it! But where is the rest?

I suggest the following changes as a minimum improvement:

- link to 6 directly from 1 (even better: insert cute calendar with

highlighted release timelines on 1!-)

- add current version overview for each OS to 1 (in case the

per-OS versions are out of sync)

- add trac links to 6 that list the showstopper tickets for

the current release (this assumes that the showstoppers have trac tickets and, preferably, milestone and severity information)

- add info about next release and blocking issues to 3 (and to

the other OS-specific pages) - downloaders should not have to guess that the current version is a beta, or what problems have been found with it

Building with the tarball on a system without happy installed fails because happy is not built before alex. Reordering the entries in packages/platform.packages fixes the problem. Patch attached.

Make a list of things to check to see if the installer works. As many as possible of these should be automated, eg using scripts + HUnit or something.

eg:

• compile hello world
• ghci -package blah
• ghc-pkg check (see for example what could go wrong)
• run full ghc testsuite perhaps
• Check all executables are .. executable
• Build canonical apps: e.g. darcs.
• Build a large subset of Hackage.
  • Check that haskell platform minor versions build the same set : http://blog.well-typed.com/2009/03/regression-testing-with-hackage/

Installer modes and actions should be clearly documented so that users can make informed choices regarding which options to pick. This information should be also linked to from the download page.

To make it easier to use several HP versions installed on the same machine, there should be a convenient way to temporary modify the environment to make a specific HP version the default. If you have used Visual Studio, then vcvars32.bat is what I have in mind. Bulat also suggested adding a GUI tool for this. This ticket depends on #63.

GHC 7.6 will have a 64-bit Windows version. If we decide to use GHC 7.6 for the next release, we should also provide a 64-bit version of the Windows installer.

Documentation for GLUT and maybe some other packages is missing, even though the installer now ships with documentation for the extralibs. I'll have to investigate why is that happening.

Current installer almost works when run under a limited user account, but the error message could be more clear. A more ambitious goal is to support a special "limited user" install mode.