[Haskell-cafe] Re: [darcs-users] Poll: Do you need to be able to build darcs from source on GHC 6.6?

[Jason Dagit]

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> wrote:
> "Jason Dagit" <dagit at codersbase.com> writes:
>> Debian is nice in some ways and it's really great that stable lives up
>> to its name, but I am sad that Debian has such old software for so
>> long.
>
> Those two properties are strongly correlated.
>
> There is backports.org for cases where you want to cherry-pick a handful
> of packages for which stability is less important than newness.  Of
> course, GHC 6.8 isn't on backports.org at present.  That means either
> it's non-trivial to backport, or nobody has volunteered the time.

What is the cost/benefit for providing a backport?  Suppose we wanted
to provide a backport so that we could drop a dependency on old
software.  Could we realistically tell users to get an update from the
backport?

Then we still have OpenBSD users.

I think we don't have a realistic solution other than to deal with the
maintenance burden of supporting antique software.  Thus I think the
version/upgrade matrix is handy so we can plan/schedule when it is
safe to drop support.

Thanks!
Jason