Bootstrapping 7.8 using 7.10

[Edward Z. Yang]

OK, let me clarify the modern situation right now:

    - Libraries which need to have their bounds bumped are now hpc,
      hoopl, haskeline, terminfo, Cabal (the new ones are due to the
      filepath bump)

    - An alternative to the transformers issue is to simply remove
      transformers as a bootstrap package. This is what my current
      ghc-7.8 branch does.

Cheers,
Edward

Excerpts from Yitzchak Gale's message of 2015-03-18 08:10:36 -0700:
> Moving here from Reddit, as suggested by Herbert.
> This a continuation of a thread that started with
> Edward Yang's post here:
> 
> http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2014-October/025389.html
> 
> continued here, a few months later:
> 
> http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2014-December/025529.html
> 
> and ended here, in the following month:
> 
> http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2015-January/025551.html
> 
> Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote on Reddit
> (http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2zc2jg/ghc_7101_rc3_is_out_test_it_while_its_fresh/cpindvt)
> 
> > I think I remember what the problem was with your patch (and why it
> > wasn't picked up rightaway): you needed tweaks to boot packages such
> > as transformers would cause the GHC source-tarball to diverge from
> > the officially released upstream packages. One solution would be to
> > rather provide an out-of-tree patch a user can apply manually,
> > rather than making an official GHC 7.8.5 release with unofficial
> > modifications to upstream packages (which would also require some
> > administration overhead on the Git level as upstream packages are
> > automatically mirrored Git submodules).
> 
> I think Edward's last post (in January, linked above) addressed those
> concerns. In summary: release upstream point releases for hpc and
> hoopl that only bump the dependencies of base and time, and provide
> instance Applicative IO in the GHC sources for 7.8.5 so that no change
> is needed for transformers.
> 
> Will that work? Can we go with this?
> 
> Thanks,
> Yitz