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

[Trent W. Buck]

"Trent W. Buck" <trentbuck at gmail.com> writes:

> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 12:39:28PM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>> Trent W. Buck writes:
>> 
>>  > In an ideal world, we just make sure it builds with the latest tools,
>>  > and let the users of stable distros worry about telling us if it
>>  > breaks against whatever versions they care about.
>> 
>> This is very disappointing coming from (some) developers of *version
>> control software*!  You'd think they, of all software developers,
>> would be sympathetic to the need to, well, control versions!
>
> Let me clarify that the above are my *personal* opinions, and I'm not
> really involved in the Darcs Haskell code -- just the surrounding
> build and documentation infrastructure.
>
> I'm speaking more from my role as a Debian maintainer and user than as
> a member of the Darcs comunity.

Actually, even more than that I'm speaking as someone who for years
tried to keep shell scripts portable and POSIX clean and working even on
ten-year-old versions of Solaris... before deciding that I was investing
waaaaay too much time testing on those systems considering approximately
zero of my users ran them.  So I said "fuck it, I'll use bash and assume
GNU coreutils, and if it breaks on someone's system, they'll tell me."