GHC 7.8 release?

[Doaitse Swierstra]

Although it will definitely solve all problems, it would help if hackage would automatically send out mails to maintainers of packages which do not compile with specific ghc versions.

I have ran a couple of time into the situation where new GHC releases did nor compile my packages anymore, and I only found out by this being pointed out to me. I do not go over the hackage pages of my packages on a daily basis.

The changes I had to make were usually minor, and fixing the problems was easy (except for the case where I had to a add a complicated local type, when let bindings were no longer polymorphic),

 Doaitse


On Feb 10, 2013, at 10:50 , Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au>
 wrote:

> Simon Peyton-Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>:
>> If there's a path to having a release strategy as Manuel suggests, and having an intermediate release  with the new vector primops, type extensions and such goodness, then I'm all for it.  A lot of these bits are things ill start using almost immediately in production / real software, esp if I'm not needing to patch every stable library beyond maybe relaxing versioning constraints.
>> 
>> Let me suggest once more a possible path, along the lines you suggest
>> ·        For people who value stability: use the Haskell Platform.  Ignore GHC releases.
>> ·        For people who want as many features as possible: use GHC releases.
>> ·        For people who want to live on the bleeding edge: build HEAD from source
>>  
>> The Haskell Platform decides which GHC release to use, advertises that to package authors who do whatever updates are needed.  HP may perfectly sensibly skip an entire release entirely.
>>  
>> In short, I think we already have the situation that you desire.  Perhaps we just need to market it better? 
>>  
>> Or am I mistaken?
> 
> There is one kink: for GHC releases to be *useful* substitutes for the HP for people who want medium stability, they must not change (expect maybe add to) the APIs in GHC versions that do not coincide with HP releases. 
> 
> Why? If they change APIs, many of the packages on Hackage will not build with these intermediate GHC releases, which makes them useless for anything, but testing GHC.
> 
> Otherwise, I am perfectly happy with your suggestion. However, this is not the status quo. All (major) GHC releases do break critical packages on Hackage.
> 
> Manuel
> 
> 
> 
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