Quick Start Guide Confusion

[abhillman]

Thank you kindly for all your hard work on this web framework.The quickstart guide (http://www.yesodweb.com/page/quickstart) suggests the following:

stack build yesod-bin cabal-install --install-ghc

This goes and downloads and installs libraries and binaries that seem to already be present on my system when from both haskell-platform and from running stack new my-project yesod-sqlite. As a relative newcomer to Haskell, this process feels confusing and raises questions like:

• will I have to do this each time I create a yesod project?
• what is the reason for reinstalling GHC?
• why is this process relatively slow?

Could it be sensible to update the quick start documentation to give a clearer explanation about what's going on? Thank you kindly for your consideration and apologies if these questions have been raised before.

[snoyberg]

I don't believe such content is appropriate for a quick start guide which, by its nature, is intended to give straightforward instructions on how to do something, not the philosophy behind that choice. I will say that the Haskell Platform itself is a major problem, and we do a lot to avoid using it anywhere or recommend its usage.

As to your direct questions:

• You will not have to reinstall GHC and the libraries each time you create a Yesod project, unless a new GHC version is being used
• We reinstall GHC because we can't trust the system GHC. It's been a long source of bugs for people, due to such things as missing profiling libraries
• Building all the libraries takes time