Reviving the LTS Discussions (ALT: A separate LTS branch)

[John Lato]

Austin, thanks for starting this thread.  I think David raises a lot of
very important points.  In particular, I don't think an LTS plan can be
successful unless there's significant demand (probably from commercial
Haskell users), and it would almost certainly require that those users make
a commitment to do some of the work themselves.

I think David's suggestion is probably a good place to start.  For that
matter, anyone who's interested could probably just fork the github repo,
pull in patches they want, and work away, but it does seem a bit nicer/more
efficient to be able to integrate with trac.

John

On Fri Nov 07 2014 at 11:45:34 PM David Feuer <david.feuer at gmail.com> wrote:

> GHC is an open source project. People work on it because
>
> 1. They enjoy it and find it interesting,
> 2. They need it to work well to support their own software,
> 3. They're trying to write a paper/get a degree/impress their peers, or,
> in very rare cases,
> 4. Someone pays them to do it.
> People are also willing to do some kinds of minor maintenance work because
> 5. They feel a sense of obligation to the community
> but this is not likely, on its own, to keep many people active.
>
> What does this have to do with LTS releases? The fact is that having
> people who want an LTS release does not necessarily mean that anyone else
> should do much of anything about it. If they don't really care, they're
> likely to half-build an LTS process and then get sidetracked.
>
> So what do I think should be done about this? I think "GHC headquarters"
> should make a standing offer to any person, group, or company interested in
> producing an LTS release: an offer of Trac, and Phabricator, and
> Harbormaster, and generally all the infrastructure that GHC already uses.
> Also an offer of advice on how to manage releases, deal with common issues,
> etc. But a promise of programming power seems likely to be an empty one,
> and I don't see the point of trying to push it. If someone wants an LTS
> release, they need to either make one themselves or pay someone to do the
> job.
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