release schedule and Linux distros

[Mark Lentczner]

(sorry if this is a double post - my earlier one seems to have only
resulted in a dozen mailer-daemon messages to me):

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 5:35 AM, Jens Petersen <juhpetersen at gmail.com>
 wrote:

> A new early (beta?) release based on ghc-7.4.2 would be a good thing IMHO.
>
It is almost as much work to do sub-in another ghc (as the all the ghc
provided packages change) as it is to do a "full" release. This 2012.2.1.0
release wouldn't add anything else beyond 7.4.2.

How do the packagers feel? Do we want to spend the next month working on
this?

>  Sure we could/can, but the whole point of this discussion was to avoid
> that so that it would be easier for Linux distros to follow Haskell
> Platform.
>
An issue is that every release of HP causes another compatibility target
for software package authors. This is in tension with our desire to keep
"current" with GHC.

Thus, the tension distros feel between "following the HP exactly" vs.
"bumping individual components (including GHC) to latest" is exactly the
tension we want. If we create intermediate releases just to bring up to
latest features, then we have shifted the tension from distros to the
developers ("do I add this HP release as another testing target?").

I have further thoughts along these lines.... but I think I start a new
thread for it.

> I don't see why the ("baby") distros need to be "thrown out" together with
> ("the bath water") my over eager-schedule.
>
It was just that your schedule was the only concrete set of dates anyone
gave me to work with.

Then, on inspection, it seemed to me that for the Ubuntu release distro, we
were actually aligned about as best we could. The long delay that we see in
getting the lastest GHC and libs to users is actually part of the long
stability cycle built into the release plans of Ubuntu.

Most of the other distros either have a similar situation, or no published
regular schedule at all (which leaves us with little recourse to do any
better).

In short - still seems to me that our planned release schedule works pretty
well for the distros.
- Mark
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