upgrading GHC

[Bulat Ziganshin]

Hello Simon,

Thursday, February 21, 2008, 5:43:00 PM, you wrote:

these are two orthogonal questions

> The idea is to have a group of people who manage "distributions" of Haskell
> software.

i don't think that we need so much programmers in order to add to
Cabal just one field "HLP compatibility" :)))

HLP-compatible libraries will assemble into gems automagically, are
you see it? ;)  so it becomes mainly an advertising problem. it will
be great if ghc/hugs/nhc will continue to be released each Autumn.
this will allow to port most of the libraries till December and then
advertise it as Haskell-20xx gem. actually, we may even recommend to
tag libraries (starting from base) with year of release as their major
version so it will require less thinking - just use GHC-2008 with
ByteString-2008, HTTP-2008 and so on (while HTTP-2008 may be also
remain compatible with a few last gems, say starting from Haskell-2006)


>>>  I wonder if it would have been simpler to ship GHC-6.8
>>> with a base-1.0 package or provide it on Hackage that just re-exports the
>>> old modules in the known way

the problem here is not lack of gems but fluctuation of base lib.
don't skip that he needs to use the same code with ghc 6.4...6.8. the
only 100% solution of this problem proposed at this moment is freezing
of base

-- 
Best regards,
 Bulat                            mailto:Bulat.Ziganshin at gmail.com