release schedule and Linux distros

[Chris Dornan]

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

OK, I have been thinking further about this and I am even more inclined to
think it would be an excellent idea for the Haskell Platform to lash it's
release cycle to the mast of the Fedora & Ununtu release cycles, for the
following reasons.

1) There seems to be general agreement on calendar-based release cycles, but
that is difficult to do in the absence of hard constraints -- hasn't this
been the case with the Haskell Platform? Here we have an excellent
opportunity to strengthen our discipline.

2) The ability of Fedora to crank out FC releases is quite awesome and I
think they are of a high quality. (I am not saying there isn't comparable
excellence elsewhere.) Further when you come to install Fedora, under the
major groups of programming tools alongside the mainstream offerings like
Python and Java you now get Haskell. This is a major coup! (Do we have
anything comparable with any other O/S installers? That is not a rhetorical
question -- I am curious.) This was only possible because of much sustained
hard work done to a high level (as is true of all of the major distros, of
course). As things stand it is hard to put all that work in only for it then
to languish for a fair few months until the next FC release.

I don't know it nearly so well but I expect this is all true of the Ubuntu
distro too.

Chris