Fw: Long term support - in general and Windows XP specifically

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

On 2014-11-08 at 20:32:17 +0100, Howard B. Golden wrote:

[...]

> I am an interested observer, not an active developer, so take my
> comments with this in mind. I wonder if the release of 7.10 is being
> rushed. Perhaps once a year releases are too frequent for everyone
> except the bleeding edge, who may be satisfied with snapshots. Maybe a
> reallocation of developer effort should be considered. This question
> deserves to be considered even if it is ultimately discarded.

Fyi, last year there was already a discussion sub-thread debating a
change of GHC's yearly major release cycle over at

  http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/23425/focus=23451

IIRC, the conclusion was basically that a yearly cycle is a good
compromise balancing all needs/wishes involved.


IMO, since GHC gains so many new features/improvements every year
already, releasing less often would, for one, increase the amount of new
(potentially non-backward compatible changes) features contained in a
release, therefore increasing the work involved to update old code-bases
to a new GHC release[1], while at the same time give less opportunity to
get short release-feedback cycles (as Hackage developers probably only
take serious proper stable GHC releases (candidates), rather than
work-in-progress snapshots that are fast moving targets, potentially
exhibiting all sorts of transient bugs).

IOW, what I'm basically saying is that I'm a proponent of

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often




 [1]: An *extreme* example of what can happen if you accumulate too many
      changes into a new compiler/language release is the Python3
      situation, where it took ages for code-bases to get updated/ported
      from Python2 to Python3 (and it's still ongoing), as the upgrade
      path was too steep, while Python3 development was even slowed down
      for a few years by a self-imposed "Python Language Moratorium" to
      let Python3's adoption catch up.

Cheers,
  hvr