[GHC DevOps Group] Fwd: Release policies

[Ben Gamari]

"Boespflug, Mathieu" <m at tweag.io> writes:

> Thanks for the feedback, Michael.
>
> Manuel, I believe you are also a Cabal-the-library consumer in Haskell For Mac?
>
> Michael, you brought up another problem tangentially related to the
> original integer-gmp issue but that was not in my original list
> earlier in this thread:
>
> * Cabal-2.0.0 had breaking changes in the API.
>
> This means that by association GHC itself broke BC, because it shipped
> with Cabal-2.0, without the usual grace period.
>
I'm a bit confused; by "the usual grace period" do you mean the Core
Library Committee's three release policy? AFAIK this policy only applies
to libraries under CLC control (e.g. those defined in the Report and
perhaps template-haskell). The only other compatibility guarantee that
GHC provides is the "two release policy", which stipulates that GHC
should be bootstrappable with the two most recent major GHC releases.

GHC has never, as far as I am aware, considered major version bumps of
its dependencies to be part of its interface. We perform a major bump of
most libraries with nearly every release [1]. Perhaps I've misunderstood
your statement?

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Commentary/Libraries/VersionHistory
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