release schedule and Linux distros

[Jens Petersen]

Thanks to Joachim and Chris for their follow-up comments.

(Unfortunately the original thread disappeared in my gmail!! :-(
so I have to start a new thread to continue this conversation.)

I thought of one thing since yesterday that would in a way at least
bring some Linux parity though it doesn't help the Linux distros directly:

I think HP Linux tarballs could/should also be made for releases
like they are currently for Windows and MacOS.  This is not
perfect of course: eg Ubuntu 12.04 and Fedora 17 both ship with
newer gmp5 (soname) than used for the ghc-7.4.1 binary tarballs.
But this can at least be fixed by a symlink hack, and doesn't
happen often anyway - so probably good enough (I think similar
issues might also affect different MacOS versions for example).

For consistency it would probably be good to use a similar build environment
to the ghc tarballs for making the Platform Linux tarballs.

Is anyone interested in this?  It would at least give
early Linux user adopters who use the ghc tarballs say
a quick way to get a prebuilt HP.  I don't know whether
ghc should be bundled too.

I hope there will be more discussion on the Platform schedule too. :-)

Thanks, Jens