Platform policy question: API compatability in minor releases

[Don Stewart]

bos:
> On Sat, May 9, 2009 at 5:44 PM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk>
> wrote:
> 
>     I should probably point out the strategy we are trying to implement:
>     time based releases rather than feature based.
> 
> And a fine idea that is. I do think that aiming for a 4-6 week minor release
> cycle is massive overkill, though. As a distro packager, there's no way I'm
> going to put myself through rebuild-the-world hell once a month because the
> core libraries keep getting tweaked, but then I run the risk of missing
> genuinely important bug or security fixes because I'm not paying attention.
> This "be careful with update frequency" problem is probably more acute for GHC
> than other languages because of the way that code tends to be inlined so
> aggressively.
> 
> I'd aim for quarterly releases, with intermediate bugfix releases iff there's a
> genuine serious problem that needs fixing.

Quarterly major releases? 

That's a good point: as far as distros are concerned, major and minor
releases have about the same impact in terms of labour.

-- Don