release schedule and Linux distros

[Joachim Breitner]

Hi,

fullquote for Iain’s benefit, who takes care for Haskell in Ubuntu but
may not be on this mailing list.

Am Donnerstag, den 07.06.2012, 15:55 +0900 schrieb Jens Petersen:
> For a while I have been feeling that Linux distros seem to be at a bit
> of a disadvantage compared to Windows and MacOS for Haskell Platfom
> releases.
> 
> Since distros ship a lot more Haskell packages than just Platform,
> updating haskell-platform is a major task for us...
> 
> I think at least Ubuntu and Fedora are basically on time-based release
> schedules.  In particular Ubuntu releases twice a year in April and
> October and the Fedora Project normally releases roughly a month later
> [1].  Not sure if this applies as much to Debian as well, but at least
> Ubuntu and Fedora are two of the major Linux distros so it would be
> advantageous for the Haskell community using Linux systems if the
> Platform schedule could be made better for Linux users to give distros
> a better chance of shipping a recent release.
> 
> So I am wondering now what would be the optimal time for Haskell
> Platform releases say for Ubuntu?  Given that Fedora generally
> releases after Ubuntu - a date that works well for Ubuntu would
> probably work well for Fedora too.
> 
> For example looking at the coming Fedora 18 development cycle [2] the
> Alpha freeze is currently 2012-08-14 and Beta freeze is set for
> 2012-09-18.
> So for Fedora at least, if we wanted to have ghc-7.4.2+ and Haskell
> Platform 2012.4 in the next release (we just released Fedora 17 with
> haskell-platform-2011.4...), then I think we would need the final
> 2012.4 release in August and an alpha/beta release in July.  I imagine
> the cut-off dates for Ubuntu might be roughly a month earlier say, but
> hopefully the Ubuntu people can chime in on their thoughts too?
> 
> Otherwise at least for the Fedora 18 release in November probably we
> will just stick with ghc-7.4.1 and HP 2012.2 to follow the stable
> platform.  The current HP schedule of a final in November is really
> too late for Fedora 18 and Ubuntu 12.10, but maybe okay for Fedora 19
> and Ubuntu 13.04: though that is quite a lag, which is the problem I
> am trying to highlight in this mail.
> 
> If others have thoughts or ideas for improving the turnaround time for
> Linux Haskell Platform and making Linux more of a first class HP
> citzen, I would be interested to hear them.
> 
> Personally I would favour maybe decoupling the HP source and binary
> releases completely, and also doing more regular developmental HP
> releases between the stable ones to make it a more continuous
> opensource process.


speaking for Debian: Our release process is probably a bit too
unpredictable for a fixed date. We do, however, benefit from early
version bumps in the pre-release branch; the mtl/transformer transition
is still not finished in Debian (due to having to rebuild almost 200
packages and some architectures like sparc being a bit slow these days).
Knowing about the packages versions earlier means less work after the
official release of the platform.

Greetings,
Joachim

-- 
Joachim "nomeata" Breitner
Debian Developer
  nomeata at debian.org | ICQ# 74513189 | GPG-Keyid: 4743206C
  JID: nomeata at joachim-breitner.de | http://people.debian.org/~nomeata
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