stability vs latest features (was: Re: darcs patch: GenT monad transformer variant of Gen (QuickCheck 2))

[Duncan Coutts]

On Wed, 2007-08-15 at 13:26 +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

> Isaac Dupree <isaacdupree at charter.net> wrote:
> > Personally, I don't see the need for new versions of libraries to stay
> > compatible with such old versions of GHC (is there a specific old-ghc 
> > use case I'm unaware of?).
> 
> Yes.  The default version of ghc provided by our local tech support
> people for the use of all students and staff (i.e. those who are not
> specifically researching Haskell) is ghc-6.2.2.

But that version of GHC comes with libraries that work with it. I'm
talking about libs that get bundled with the implementation, it should
be ok for them to depend on the versions of other libs that get bundled
with the implementation.

For programs or libraries distributed independently it's up to the
package author to decide how much effort they want to go to to ensure
the package builds with a wide range of implementations and library
versions.

Cabal configurations should make this situation better. Cabal does
support ghc back to 6.2.2 and with a suitable .cabal file it should be
possible to make most progs work with a range of compiler versions.


BTW, re ghc on Sparc Solaris, it does build from source, we've got ghc
6.4.1 on our Sparc Solaris9 machines in Oxford.

Duncan