One-click Hackage

[Ben Franksen]

Don Stewart wrote:
> bulat.ziganshin:
>> it's well-known that large class of users (including haskell
>> developers) prefer to use visual tools. for hackage/cabal-install this
>> means that they need a GUI that allow them to find libs they need and
>> install them. this mean some sort of GUI frontend to cabal-install,
>> that isn't yet written. but we can go other way
>> 
>> now Hackage web site by itself provides good enough GUI for library
>> search. the only problem is that after finding something useful, user
>> needs to type in "cabal install Foo" in her cmdline - and that's in
>> the best case when she know about cabal-install and had it installed
>> 
>> i think that we are just one click away of full GUI support - all
>> that's reuired is to publish on Hackage page for Foo library file
>> Foo.hackage and associate this extension with Cabal. by clicking on
>> such file user will auto download it, and then cabal will read name of
>> package to installed from the file
>> 
>> going further, Hackage may provide links to execution of "cabal
>> update" and other commands, becoming sort of GUI for cabal-install.
>> this may be provided as files with the same hackage extension
> 
> If you set this up, could you publish it to the list -- sounds like a
> very cool idea.

+1

Ben