This is certainly a gnarly problem, but I would urge the HF to not walk away from this.
At it’s creation, the HF was dedicated to broadening the adoption of Haskell, and support the Haskell tooling and infrastructure ecosystem.
The first major milestone of the HF was identification of the lack of a unified installation method as the major roadblock to Haskell adoption.
The project is listed as a proposal on the projects page:
https://haskell.foundation/projects/
Following this proposal, @hasufell and the GHCUp team went away and did the work (the work of angels) to get GHCUp up to scratch, adding stack to the tool list, solving the Windows issues and obviously striving to be the unified installer that the HF envisaged.
On establishment of these capabilities, a PR to simplify the installation section of www.haskell.org was opened.
In this PR, @chris, who is a HF Board member and the project leader of the HF unified installer project, commented:
Maybe at a future point a meaningful process for developing widely recognised universal installers can be established — I certainly hope so — but, as I see it, those conditions have yet to be met. In the meantime I think
stackandghcupshould both be offered as methods of installing Haskell development environments on the dowload page.
This represents and remains the status quo, and what is being called into question.
This is a HF Board member and the project lead for the unification project declaring in a lone PR that it unification cannot happen and announcing that stack and ghcup must be treated equally, without any further commentary or discussion. Has there been any further communication from the HF about failure of the unification project?
Has it failed? I use GHCUp after years of stack-only usage and rate it a marvellous success. It unifies us. It wants to get better and compete with new and emergent tools. It has demonstrated due care and attention towards stack usage. I want new users to enjoy this success and for the Haskell community to celebrate this win.
This is why, within this context, I contend that it is a mistake for the HF to walk away from this issue because, well, politics. The evidence suggests that, in fact, the activities of the HF has been prime causal in creating this gnarly milieu within which we are now stuck. Avoiding contention creates an impregnable defence against progress when the contentious bits are coming, in large part, from within your own tent.
Politics be damned, support GHCUp now, based on technical merit.