release schedule and Linux distros

[George Colpitts]

my two cents, fwiw:

I agree with Mark that the "planned release schedule works pretty well" but
then again I'm on the Mac so not familiar with Linux issues.

Do we have a percentage breakdown of users of the platform on Mac, Windows,
Linux and within Linux the various distros?

On the Mac my biggest concerns are maintaining compatibility with Apple OS
and Xcode updates and FFI issues with ghci and e.g. OpenGL and Euterpea
where we can't use ghci. I hope the latter is fixed before the next HP
release. wrt the former I was happy to see that the latest Xcode update
shortly after the HP release did not break that release. Hopefully the same
will be true of both the forthcoming Xcode 4.5 and Mountain Lion.


Regards
George


On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 12:32 PM, Mark Lentczner
<mark.lentczner at gmail.com>wrote:

> (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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