Request to reopen the issue of 7.8 on El Capitan

[Austin Seipp]

I wasn't aware it completely broke on El Capitan, but I think that's a
pretty extreme case (where a completely usable release simply breaks
because a hugely popular OS changes) that would warrant a 7.8.5
release, to be honest. Presumably, this would really be the only
change, so mostly OS X users would be affected by its availability.

In general people like to use the last 3 GHC releases anyway, and we
haven't even *released* 8.0 yet. And at that point, 7.8.x will be the
last 'in the chain' - so I can assume people would _still_ want 7.8 on
OS X presumably, even more than a year from today until 8.2!

At that point (8.2-ish era) if Apple keeps breaking things, we may not
do another release, but in this case I think the timescale for
user/library support is probably worth it. Otherwise OS X users are
going to have to fix it themselves, and it might be ugly (propagating
random fixes around the internet isn't going to work well, and we'll
just keep getting bug reports about this because of that - we've
already done this dance with OS X.)

I'll note this down and think about it more this week, since we'd like
to get 7.10.3 out soon as well...

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Adam Foltzer <acfoltzer at gmail.com> wrote:
> 7.8.4 is was released only ten months ago; it surprises me that we'd
> consider it acceptable to have such a recent release fail to work on new
> machines when the fix is so small as to not even require a patch to the
> source tree. In particular, I remember hearing proponents of 7.10's changes
> reassure detractors that if they choose, they can continue to use 7.8.4,
> which is no longer an option.
>
> I'd ask that we (1) reconsider the decision to stop 7.8 releases, and (2) if
> we stand by the decision, document the mitigations for users who would like
> to build their own working version of the compiler. I just finished a build
> from a source dist with `unix-2.7.1.0` and it still triggers the El Capitan
> error, so I suspect it's not as simple as just dropping the new package into
> `/libraries/unix/`.
>
> On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 4:19 PM, Carter Schonwald
> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> There are no plans to do a new 7.8 release at this Time.  Even doing a
>> point release for 7.10.3 is still speculative.
>>
>> We should reflect the capitan issue in the installation documentation.
>> And or remark that only 7.10 or newer is supported on El Capitan.
>>
>> If a user needs a 7.8 build that works on capitan, they will need to build
>> a source dist with an updated UNIX package.
>>
>>
>> On Tuesday, October 13, 2015, Adam Foltzer <acfoltzer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> The issue was brought up on this list [1] that the released versions of
>>> GHC 7.8 do not work on El Capitan due to an older `unix` package. In a
>>> subsequent GHC weekly news [2], it was announced that since El Capitan
>>> wasn't yet released, it wasn't worthwhile to put more developer time into
>>> 7.8.
>>>
>>> Now that El Capitan is out, and the existing 7.8 binaries continue to not
>>> work, I'd like to reopen this issue and request a point release with an
>>> updated `unix` package.
>>>
>>> Thank you,
>>>
>>> Adam Foltzer
>>> Research Engineer
>>> Galois, Inc.
>>>
>>> [1]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-July/009403.html
>>> [2]:
>>> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/weekly20150721#MacOSXElCapitansupport
>
>
>
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-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/