A modest proposal (re the Platform)

[Páli Gábor János]

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 11:26 AM, Sven Panne <svenpanne at gmail.com> wrote:
> Regarding compiler features, shipping GHC 7.6.3 again would mean that
> the HP is still roughly at September 2012 (the first release of GHC
> 7.6.x).

Well, there was no GHC release since April 2013, what else one could expect? :-)

> Furthermore, I don't fully buy into the argument that we
> should wait for 7.8 to stabilize: Power users will use something near
> HEAD, anyway, almost all other users will probably use the HP.

Power users use GHC HEAD, so probably they do not need to wait for HP.
 All the other users use HP, so they probably prefer stability over
features.

On Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Carter Schonwald
<carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
> Perhaps more importantly: many long standing problems, relating to
> how ghci linking works on every major platform, and having win64 support,
> look to be resolved In 7.8.

For what is worth, I have already backported some of the
FreeBSD-related fixes to 7.6.3, so most of the Hasell Cabal ports that
are officially supported on FreeBSD work smoothly there.

> These are HUGE.

But they also come with many other changes.  That is why the
probability is higher for finding bugs in 7.8.1 after the release.  Do
we have any statistics on what percent of Hackage packages build
cleanly on the latest snapshot of 7.8?

> Additionally the Cpp that's a
> bother on osx and bsd systems matter goes away for HP if the next release is
> using 7.8 (especially if a wee patch I wrote to kill the problem good this
> week gets merged in. )

Although FreeBSD 10.0 now includes Clang as default compiler, I still
have not switched to it -- that is, we still use GCC 4.6 or later
there.