GHC 7.8 release?

[Michael Snoyman]

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 3:55 PM, Ian Lynagh <ian at well-typed.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 07, 2013 at 09:42:39AM -0800, Mark Lentczner wrote:
> >
> > I wish GHC would radically change it's release process. Things like 7.8
> > shouldn't be release as "7.8". That sounds major and stable. The web site
> > will have 7.8 at the top. The warning to use the platform will fall flat
> > because it makes the platform look out of date. Really, "7.8" should be
> in
> > a different release channel, not on the front page. It should bake in
> that
> > channel for six months - where only the third group of people will use
> it,
> > until it is getting close to merge into main, at which point the fourth
> > group will start to use it, so that the day it hits main, all the
> libraries
> > just work. Ideally, the first two groups of people will not pay the
> > slightest attention to it until it is further baked.
>
> It's a catch-22: We don't want people to use a new release until all the
> bugs have been found and fixed, and all the libraries have been updated.
> But if people don't use it, then the bugs won't be found and the
> libraries won't be updated.
>
> I think you're saying that you'd like the uptake of new GHC versions to
> be slower, which would mean fewer people would be using 7.6 now, but in
> the last few days I've seen the Debian guys have had to send mails to
> maintainers telling them that their packages don't work with 7.6:
>     http://lists.debian.org/debian-haskell/2013/02/threads.html
> despite 7.6 having been out for 5 months and about to enter the HP.
>
> Perhaps more automatic Hackage building, with a group of people looking
> at the logs of failing packages and acting appropriately, is the way
> forward. Some cases (such as "installation failed due to dependencies
> not being installable") you'd want to be handled automatically.
>
>
> Thanks
> Ian
>
>
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This is an issue I'm hoping Stackage will be able to help address.
Currently, we're running daily builds of the Stackage package set
(currently at about 330 packages) using the most recent Haskell Platform.
However, I'm hoping to augment this with GHC 7.6.2 as well (obviously
dropping the Haskell Platform version constraints at that point, as they
would not be compatible). We could also theoretically include release
candidates in this process, which I think would help flesh out bugs and
drive support for newer GHCs more quickly.

Michael
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