Is there going to be a way to upgrade Stack?

[radix]

Say I've installed Stack by downloading the binary distribution for Mac OS X -- it'd be nice if I could just run something like "stack upgrade-stack" to get a new release -- and also, for stack to notify when there's a new version, a la Python's pip tool.

[bitemyapp]

+1

[snoyberg]

There's an open issue for discussing this point, which we do need to get a solid answer to:

#74

[ndmitchell]

I see the two issues as separate. One is about how you typically do a first install. One is about how you do an update. On Linux these might be the same, but on Windows you want to copy a binary the first time then stack upgrade afterwards.

[3noch]

@ndmitchell There's always chocolatey.

[radix]

If stack grows a way to install packages to the system (whether in /usr or in ~/.local or whatever), then it would make sense for the upgrade process to just be to use that mechanism. (stack install --upgrade stack?)

To make this interoperate with the initially downloaded binary, perhaps lein could be used as an inspiration: when you download lein, you're just getting a shell script, which checks if lein is installed in the user's home directory in the expected location, and then invokes that. If not, it downloads and installs the latest version. This means that even if the package isn't "really" installed, the first time the user runs lein, it's installed properly.

Of course this mostly just applied to OS X and Unix, but I guess the same general idea can be applied to Windows as well. It's just that you can't rely on a simple shell script in that case.

[3noch]

@radix So lein has some sort of proxy script that does update-checking/downloading before running an actual app? Instead of a script, you could do that with a thin executable binary that would be cross-platform.

[radix]

@3noch yeah, good point. bash isn't a great language to write software in :)

[3noch]

@radix Haskell's ability to run on bare metal is a huge selling point in my book!

[3noch]

FWIW, "binary that would be cross-platform" would of course mean we'd need several binaries, one for each platform, but the code would be the same.

[snoyberg]

What if stack itself had this logic, something along the lines of:

• If I'm not being run from ~/.local/bin (and equivalent on Windows), check if ~/.local/bin/stack exists and, if so, call it with the same arguments as I received
• Otherwise, just run
• To upgrade: you run stack install-exe stack (or whatever we call that command), optionally making an upgrade-stack command that does much the same thing.

[newzealandpaul]

For Mac OSX homebrew support would be great.

[3noch]

My only thought is that now you really have two (or more) versions of a working stack on your computer that have a pretty strange relationship. It might be better to have a thin "stack runner" that is both smaller (in terms of executable size) and simpler (in terms of functionality). That runner had better never change, because you can't upgrade it. But once you have it, it would keep track of its own stack versions, install locations, etc.

[3noch]

I slightly fear stack upgrading itself to change the way it upgrades itself and then breaking...