Growing Haskell Platform

[Johan Tibell]

On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 12:50 AM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang at mit.edu> wrote:
> Excerpts from Michael Snoyman's message of Fri Dec 07 00:29:14 -0800 2012:
>> Let me give a more extreme example: suppose that the bug in text hadn't
>> simply been slower compile times, but instead it segfaulted every time you
>> appended two empty strings. What would be our response to users? Should we
>> tell them to stick with the current HP until the next one is released, and
>> hope they don't trigger the bug? Should they try and convince their whole
>> system to get rebuilt?
>
> I think the pragmatic solution here is to roll a platform point-release,
> just fixing the particular major bug.

This is the correct solution in this case. This is e.g. what Python would do.

Note that we're quite conservative in what versions of libraries we
include in the platform (i.e. we try to not use something that was
released yesterday) so we hope we won't have too many bugs that are
major enough to require a new platform release. The reasoning here is
that if people have gotten by for e.g. the last 6 months without
running into the bug they probably can live with it until the next
platform release.

-- Johan