[isabelle-dev] Standard component setup (Re: NEWS)

[Makarius]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2012, Florian Haftmann wrote:

> d) add-ons not being formal components – at the moment ghc.  I always 
> considered re-packing or wrapping this as overkill.

As a rule of thumb, the bundled Isabelle components are the essential 
things required for running the system in regular applications, packaged 
in a multi-platform way without significant external dependencies (plain 
libc/libg++ is fine). Building and maintaining such components also needs 
to be reasonably easy.  We have no formal process for that at the moment.


GHC might be not as essential on the one hand, and more complex on the 
other hand, so one could ask users to refer to a suitable package provided 
by their OS environment.  Linux seems to provide it.  For Mac OS I see it 
on MacPorts, but we no longer ask regular users to have that installed. 
For Windows/Cygwin Google reveals this page 
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.2.1/html/users_guide/ghci-cygwin.html 
with some further explanations.

(Windows/Cygwin is indeed the most strange GNU Linux system in existance, 
but once we get a double-click installer for the whole stack of 
JVM/Cygwin/Isabelle/PIDE this might easily become the platform of the 
majority of users.)


 	Makarius