more releases

[Richard Eisenberg]

Hi devs,

An interesting topic came up over dinner tonight: what if GHC made more releases? As an extreme example, we could release a new point version every time a bug fix gets merged to the stable branch. This may be a terrible idea. But what's stopping us from doing so?

The biggest objection I can see is that we would want to make sure that users' code would work with the new version. Could the Stackage crew help us with this? If they run their nightly build with a release candidate and diff against the prior results, we would get a pretty accurate sense of whether the bugfix is good. If this test succeeds, why not release? Would it be hard to automate the packaging/posting process?

The advantage to more releases is that it gets bugfixes in more hands sooner. What are the disadvantages?

Richard

PS: I'm not 100% sold on this idea. But I thought it was interesting enough to raise a broader discussion.