GHC 7.8 release?

[Johan Tibell]

Hi,

I think reducing breakages is not necessarily, and maybe not even
primarily, an issue of releases. It's more about realizing that the cost of
breaking things (e.g. changing library APIs) has gone up as the Haskell
community and ecosystem has grown. We need to be conscious of that and
carefully consider if making a breaking change (e.g. changing a function
instead of adding a new function) is really necessary. Many platforms (e.g.
Java and Python) rarely, if ever, make breaking changes. If you look at
 compiler projects (e.g. LLVM and GCC) you never see intentional breakages,
even in major releases*. Here's a question I think we should be asking
ourselves: why is the major version of base bumped with every release? Is
it really necessary to make breaking changes this often? How about aiming
for having GHC 7.10 be a release where we only add new stuff and improve
old stuff?

-- Johan

* A major GCC release usually signifies that some large change to the code
generator was made.
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