GHC HEAD vs Hackage, panic-free edition

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On 11/10/2013 19:27, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> Thanks to the efforts of the Simons, we now have a GHC that does not
> panic on any package that it's able to try compiling.
> 
> Since the last report, the number of packages on Hackage has increased
> by 1.8%, from 5564 to 5604, but the number of failing builds has dropped
> by 4.2%, from 1186 to 1136. This is partly due to a few widely-used
> packages (e.g. test-framework) being updated to build with HEAD.
> 
> Here are the top 20 packages that caused a build failure in a package
> that depended upon them, with the count of the number of failed builds
> next to each. I have highlighted in *red+bold* package versions that are
> out of date, typically where the depending-upon package simply has upper
> bounds on its dependencies that are too strict.

What are the expectations on package owners here? My understanding was
that the period inbetween GHC release and HP release is the time to fix
this stuff up. However that obviously makes exercises such as this harder.

Cheers,

Ganesh