Re: Data instances in ghc 6.2.1?

>| [has there been any progress on the idea of having weekly or so
>|  windows snapshots of CVS GHC generated automatically?]
>PS Also you could just build GHC yourself!  It's not hard these days.

I don't doubt that in principle, and I'm happy to hear it (I'm sure a 
lot of work has gone into making it so). In practice, however:

- my trusty old notebook's spec: 

    W98, PII 366MHz, 192Mb RAM, 6Gb Disk
    this is fine for most apps and small development, but the only
    free space on this generous disk is what I get by deleting other
    stuff, and building largish things takes longer than downloading
    them (e.g., a full HaRe build takes just under an hour, compared 
    to a few minutes on a normal system) - no chance for GHC builds.

[yes, I know it's long overdue for replacement, and I look forward 
 to keeping more up-to-date with GHC afterwards; the point is that
 "low-spec" systems live long these days, and have a share of the
 market because everyone's latest-and-greatest will join them in 
 a few years; they are quite useful long after being shiny, so we 
 shouldn't take recent sytems and their specs for granted]

- I like to do stuff others can use, so even after I can build GHC,
    that won't help those who can't or won't. So I look ahead for
    things to come, but tend to stick to things that are here (or
    readily available, which is why snapshots would help).

Cheers,
Claus

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?-)