Announce: Haskell Platform 2012.4.0.0

[Mark Lentczner]

Many people are asking why GHC 7.6 isn't in the platform and when it will
be.

As the Platform is intended to be a stable, "just install it and it works"
solution - we want to include GHC version that is stable with respect to
the community. This means that before we freeze the package version
selections for a platform release, there needs to be enough time for
packages to settle into a stable, consistent version set. We want this not
only for the packages in the platform, but also for packages commonly
installed from hackage.

Since GHC provides almost half the packages in the platform, a new GHC
version is a fair bit of version upheaval. GHC 7.6 was released September
6th, which gave only four weeks before the 2012.4.0.0 version freeze, which
I didn't think was enough time. We might have been able to stabilize the
platform's packages... but I'm still seeing people having version problems
with 7.6 and some hackage packages.

I was probably too conservative with the schedule this time round. Next
release <http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/ReleaseTimetable>I've
pull in some phases, and tried to make it a little more speedy. The
version freeze date is *April 8th, 2013* for a release *May 6th, 2013*.
Whatever GHC is available *early-February* should be stable enough: It will
give enough time for both the platform packages, and common hackage
packages to adapt to it.

If the community would like the platform to use a GHC that is released
*in*February, then the platform team needs a) some advanced notice so
we can
start contacting package maintainers early, and b) support of the community
to get common hackage packages working with that release before the April
8th date.

- Mark


On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Mark Lentczner <mark.lentczner at gmail.com>wrote:

> I'm pleased to announce that Haskell Platform 2012.4.0.0<http://www.haskell.org/platform/index.html#2012.4.0.0>is now available.
>
> This release contains three new packages to the platform:
>
>    - async-2.0.1.3<http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/async-2.0.1.3/doc/html/index.html>
>    - split-0.2.1.1<http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/split-0.2.1.1/doc/html/index.html>
>    - vector-0.10.0.1<http://vector-0.10.0.1http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/vector-0.10.0.1/doc/html/index.html>
>
> The remainder of the changes are small updates to the versions of GHC (now
> 7.4.2) and several other packages.
>
> Installers for Windows <http://www.haskell.org/platform/windows.html>, Mac
> OS X <http://www.haskell.org/platform/mac.html>, and the source tar ball<http://www.haskell.org/platform/linux.html>are all now available from the site. Linux distribution packages should be
> available shortly.
>
> On behalf of the Haskell Platform team<http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/Members>
> ,
>  - Mark "mzero" Lentczner, Release Manager
>
>
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