GHC release series adoption rates

[Ben Gamari]

Clinton Mead <clintonmead at gmail.com> writes:

> Hi All
>
> The recent GHC blog post:
> https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20240521-ghc-release-priorities.html
> states:
>
> *"9.6.5 seems to be a relatively stable release so far and we plan to
> prioritise fixes given the relatively higher adoption of this branch"*
>
> I was wondering where this information came from? Is this based on a number
> of downloads or some other metric? Number of companies that have adopted
> the version? How many stack/ghcup pulls? Or just a vibe/what people seem to
> be talking about?
>
> If there are hard numbers, are they public?
>
Sadly we don't have hard numbers. However, we do try to keep an eye on a
few "softer" metrics:

 * which releases tend to see the most new tickets
 * which releases tend to come up in online discussion
 * how much of the ecosystem has adapted to which releases

I will admit that I'm not entirely happy with the amount of judgement
that goes into determining support windows currently. My tick-tock
release cadence proposal [1] was an attempt at proposing a more
predictable schedule, but sadly it never gained much support.

> The current project I'm working on is still on GHC 9.2.2, so I was
> considering an upgrade to GHC 9.4.8, but this blog post has made me lean
> towards the 9.6 series instead. This is just an upgrade for stability not
> features and so we don't get too far behind. But it would be good to have
> this popularity info generally instead of having to wait for a blog post.
>
9.4 likely isn't the best upgrade target at this point. We will likely
[status] not produce any further releases in this series and our attention
has turned primarily to 9.10 and 9.6.

[status]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/GHC-status
[tick-tock]: https://github.com/haskellfoundation/tech-proposals/pull/34
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 487 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20240528/ff5017ed/attachment.sig>