Data instances in ghc 6.2.1?

[Sigbjorn Finne]

"Claus Reinke" <claus.reinke at talk21.com> writes:
...
> 
> PS. I never was quite sure why Haskell systems need an installer
>     on Windows? There used to be Haskell libraries for accessing
>     the registry, so filetype-associations and Start menu entries
>     could be done optionally, by a little separate Haskell program, 
>     and since GHC doesn't do any localisation or PATH settings, 
>     the rest would mostly just be decompression and unpacking, 
>     right? Or is that too naive a view of things?-)
> 

No, not at all -- at least not for nightly snapshots, good old tarballs is
the best way to distribute these. Installers makes better sense for
releases though, providing a one(2?)-click package for people to
get started with GHC, i.e., not requiring users to have misc utils
(e.g., tar/winzip) installed on their machines.

Writing a Haskell program that manipulates your file type associations
wouldn't be hard.

--sigbjorn