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Comment by lallysingh | Hacker News Reader

Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity whose business model works better the more dependence their users have on their tools.

FP complete isn't misbehaving, but they're putting themselves in a position to do a lot of damage if they did.

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> Stack is exactly that, and it's controlled by a private entity

It's open source and the bug reports and feature requests merged in seem to indicate the aims have been making building Haskell projects easier.

I don't see indications of vetos in favor of FP complete that hurt the Haskell community.

Stack isn't just a tool, it's also infrastructure to support that tool.

I use it constantly, and like it, but let's not pretend there isn't a shift in power and influence as a result.

I thought FP Complete had moved on from selling tools (like the online IDE they used to host) to being a Haskell consulting firm?

Yup. Stack was born out of our internal build tool "fpbuild". We found that having a good build tool was crucial to our productivity. Stack was created to better satisfy our own needs, and we shared it with the community so that they can also benefit from it and help make it better.

When someone's consistently had good contributions and discussion, we've granted them maintainer level privileges. Certainly quite a lot of stack's development and maintenance is done by FP Complete folks. However, our intention is to make the project as open to contribution and feedback as possible.

You can't deny there's pattern emerging of reinventing existing Haskell infrastructure under the pretense to "move away from infrastructure that is showing its age" rather than help improving the existing one

Moreover, this new tooling/services are operated and maintained by FPC employees which, quite conveniently, moves control away from the community board to FP Complete which by design has commercial interests at its heart.

I'm not saying FP Complete is doing evil things right now but this creeping shift of powers into the hands of a commercial entity is making me uneasy.

How strong is that dependency?

I've set up a few things using Stack, but as far as I can see there's nothing that would stop me just downloading the intended versions of GHC and the various needed packages from Hackage if Stack went away tomorrow.

Are other projects more tightly integrated in some way, such that backing out in the event of catastrophic failure of the Stack ecosystem would be unreasonably or prohibitively difficult?

Not terribly. You may be able to replace it with nix now.

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