Release plans

[Iavor Diatchki]

Hello,

I think that there are a lot of useful features that are in HEAD that would
be useful to a wider audience than GHC devs, so a release before October
would certainly be useful.  I don't think it is that important if it is
called 7.7.1 or 7.8.1 but I think that it needs to be a fixed version, in
the sense that all code (including GHC libraries) is tagged in the repos
and, possibly, we make an entry for it in the track system, so that people
can record bugs against it.

Given that GHC is very actively developed, it might make sense to have one
of these "snapshot" releases every 3 or so months, as "technology preview",
and without any promises about stability or compatibility (in particular,
they should not be considered for inclusion in the HP or standard Linux
distributions).   This would give us a fairly low over-head middle ground
between the volatility of nightly builds, and the long
time between official releases.

-Iavor



On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Carter Schonwald <
carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:

> A 7.7 snapshot would be useful for me in a number of ways:
>
> a) I often spend some time prior to recent GHC releases trying to build
> all the various major packages, and often send in patches to  maintainers
> during that window (or at least the start of patches). Having a fixed
> snapshot release that maintainers can use to validate any such future
> proofing patches would be tremendously helpful
>
> b) Theres a bunch of engineering i'm currently up where I want to use some
> of the features very soon, and making it easier for other people to use the
> open source subsets of that engineering sooner rather than later would be
> valuable!
>
> c) lowering the barrier to folks using and stress testing these features
> may catch problems sooner.
>
> note: i'm ok with compiling ghc from source, but many people who might be
> happy to test those new features might find that a bit daunting the first
> time.
>
> cheers
> -Carter
>
>
> On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 6:58 AM, John Wiegley <johnw at fpcomplete.com>wrote:
>
>> >>>>> Ian Lynagh <ian at well-typed.com> writes:
>>
>> > Would a 7.7.x recommended snapshot be useful to you? Tell us if you want
>> > one.
>>
>> I think that could very useful, sort of like what the Linux kernel did
>> before
>> they stopped.
>>
>> I'm never sure if building from HEAD will produce a compiler I should use
>> for
>> getting real work done, but I wouldn't have the same reservations
>> concerning a
>> 7.7.x "interim developer release".
>>
>> --
>> John Wiegley
>> FP Complete                         Haskell tools, training and consulting
>> http://fpcomplete.com               johnw on #haskell/irc.freenode.net
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
>> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
>> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list
> Glasgow-haskell-users at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/attachments/20130320/00dfe63f/attachment.htm>