[GHC DevOps Group] Making GHC's fast release cadence work

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On Mon, Jul 1, 2019 at 8:09 PM Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
> Naturally, delays like this make it hard for GHC to maintain its faster
release cycle
> ...
> How do you think we might speed up this process?

IMO You're asking the wrong question.

This seems based on a premise that everyone agreed with a faster
release cycle... to me the downsides on the ecosystem and
infrastructure of a faster release churn significantly outweight the
modest benefit some people might perceive; and the issue's we've been
observing (not only boot libraries, but also the 10k packages on
Hackage) with the overspeeded release cycle are IMO a sign that we're
moving faster than the ecosystem can accommodate. Just because GHC HQ
managed to optimize their release processes (and I have to say, at the
expense of the release quality -- GHC 8.6.5 was the first major
release since GHC's beginning to require five attempts -- and I have
to note that this results in annoying busy work for GHC packagers like
myself) doesn't mean that everyone else has the time and energy to
adapt to this new order as well.