more releases

[Ben Gamari]

Richard Eisenberg <eir at cis.upenn.edu> writes:

> I think some of my idea was misunderstood here: my goal was to have
> quick releases only from the stable branch. The goal would not be to
> release the new and shiny, but instead to get bugfixes out to users
> quicker. The new and shiny (master) would remain as it is now. In
> other words: more users would be affected by this change than just the
> vanguard.
>
I see. This is something we could certainly do.

It would require, however, that we be more pro-active about
continuing to merge things to the stable branch after the release.
Currently the stable branch is essentially in the same state that it was
in for the 7.10.2 release. I've left it this way as it takes time and
care to cherry-pick patches to stable. Thusfar my poilcy has been to
perform this work lazily until it's clear that we will do
another stable release as otherwise the effort may well be wasted.

So, even if the steps of building, testing, and uploading the release
are streamlined more frequent releases are still far from free. Whether
it's a worthwhile cost I don't know.

This is a difficult question to answer without knowing more about how
typical users actually acquire GHC. For instance, this effort would
have minimal impact on users who get their compiler through their
distribution's package manager. On the other hand, if most users
download GHC bindists directly from the GHC download page, then perhaps
this would be effort well-spent.

Cheers,

- Ben
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