[arch-haskell] Haskell's state in Arch & near future

[Peter Simons]

Hi Vesa,

 > I've found out a little late that the 7.2 series is supposedly some sort
 > of a "technology preview" branch. While I think it's totally
 > irresponsible and moronic for the GHC devs to release a point release
 > that's not supposed to be widely used [...].

actually, GHC 7.2.x is quite stable and it's perfectly alright to use it in
production. It's been dubbed a "technology preview" because the compiler
breaks backwards compatibility in ways that require library authors to
update their code. Those who don't want to deal with that situation ought to
stick to 7.0.4. However, those incompatibilities are not going to disappear
by themselves. The 7.4.x release is not going to be different in that
regard.


 > We'll have to think about if we really want 7.2 or do we wait for 7.4.

It comes down to the question: are you willing to patch lots of packages to
fix compilation? If you don't want to do that, then you'll be stuck with
7.0.4 for quite some time. If you don't mind patching packages to fix
compilation, then updating to 7.2.2 right now is a fine choice.

Take care,
Peter