proposal for updates in next major HP release

[Duncan Coutts]

All,

The previous decision[1] of the libraries list is that major HP releases
are to be on a 4 month cycle for at least the first 12 months.

[1]: http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/Policy

That means we're aiming for the next major release being in early
September, about a month away from now.

This email is to propose "obvious" updates. We hope these are not
controversial and that we can quickly get an OK.

We suggest updating each package to its latest stable release, except
where noted below. In most cases this means relatively insignificant API
changes. The cases of particular interest are:

        regex-* packages updated from 0.7x versions to 0.9x versions
        QuickCheck update from version 1.2.x to version 2.x

        We are not proposing to switch to parsec-3.x at this time.

        This proposal does not cover updates to the OpenGL package(s).

        Remove editline package
        Remove packedstring package

The rationale for removing editline is that it is no longer used by ghc.
It was only included in the platform in the first place because early
releases of ghc-6.10.x shipped it as a core library.

The rationale for removing packedstring is that is has been deprecated
for some years now. It was only included in the platform because the
template-haskell package still depended on it. The latest version of
template-haskell no longer requires it.


Duncan
(on behalf of the HP release team)