Johan Holmquist writes:

I'd say that binary packages are really valuable for installing a global haskell dev environment for quick hacks and scripts for which it would not be practical to setup a project and download and build a lot of deps. At least ghc and base should be installed globally so one can just fire up the REPL to try things interactively.

I've been using `stack ghci` for that, and for more involved stuff I've used `stack exec zsh -- --login` to get a shell with access to ghc :) For scripts it's possible to create a she-bang line with `stack` that will pull down the required ghc and dependencies. So, a *realy* long startup the first time, but subsequent invocations are quick :) I'm mostly mentioning this to point out that options exist, and that maybe, just maybe, binary packages for anything but tools (stack, hlint, pandoc, ...) aren't really that useful at all any longer. /M -- Magnus Therning OpenPGP: 0x927912051716CE39 email: magnus@therning.org jabber: magnus@therning.org twitter: magthe http://therning.org/magnus Unix is the answer, but only if you phrase the question very carefully. — Unknown