Windows release quality

[Andreas Klebinger]

Hello Devs,

After running into #16408 today I realized there is as of yet no
released bindist
of the 8.6 series which I would consider stable for windows.

GHC 8.6.1 and 8.6.2 had a series of critical bugs which applied to
multiple platforms: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/16408
GHC 8.6.3 loops forever if compiling certain code using TH on windows.
This affects some very popular hackage packages: (#16057)
<https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/16057>
GHC 8.6.4 (marked stable) currently ships without profiling libraries,
making profiling impossible.

Being stuck with 8.4 is one thing, and if properly communicated not too bad.
But it requires work to even find out about these (major) issues and to
discover that 8.6 is NOT production ready for windows.

We offered the broken 8.6.3 as stable for weeks without any indication
that it was broken.
We still serve GHC 8.6.4 as stable without any hint about the missing
profiling libraries.

I can't offer solutions in this case but I feel like something about the
release management has to change if .
Having to check the GHC bugtracker to find out if the current stable
release is actually stable is just not sustainable.




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20190319/686f3eec/attachment.html>