[Haskell-cafe] Stackage with GHC 7.8 has started

[Ketil Malde]

Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> writes:

> * If you have a package with a restrictive upper bound, now's a good time
> to start testing that package with GHC 7.8 and relaxing those upper bounds.
> It would be great if, when GHC 7.8 is released, a large percentage of
> Hackage already compiled with it.

The biggest problem with upper bounds (or not), is that frequently,
somebody will update a package that requires a bleeding edge GHC.  I, on
the other hand, often need to install software on older systems (last
time was Fedora 17, more than a year old, and shipping GHC 7.0.4).
Needless to say, central packages like template-haskell, array,
stringable, and happy all fail to compile, and then I try to manually
install older and older versions of these packages, until one of them
finally works.  This is time consuming and cumbersome, and while I can
do it, I clearly cannot inflict this on my users.

(And some systems I have to work with - typically "enterprise"
distributions - ship with even older GHC versions, but then I typically
compile GHC from source.)

> * If you have a package on Hackage that is not yet on Stackage, now's a
> great time to add it. 

I'd love to, what do I need to do?

> We're going to be doing daily builds against three versions of GHC
> (7.4.2, 7.6.3, and 7.8), which will help ensure your packages continue
> to build consistently.

This is great, any chance of including yet older compilers?  The sad
fact of life is that people use "enterprise" and "LTS" distributions,
which inevitably means outdated software..

-k
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants