A modest proposal (re the Platform)

[Sven Panne]

2014/1/23 Páli Gábor János <pali.gabor at gmail.com>:
> Well, there was no GHC release since April 2013, what else one could expect? :-)

I would definitely not expect things basically 1.5 years old...

> 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.

IMHO, if one really cares about stability so much more than having
something in a sensibly stable *and* recent state, one probably
shouldn't update anything at all. That's basically the philosophy of
RHEL etc., but I don't see the HP in that arena. From my POV, the HP
should provide something as recent and consistent as possible, while
keeping the pain of using it low, but not necessarily at zero. The
notion of "bug-free SW" is an illusion, no matter how long we wait. If
there is a bug in the HP, so be it: Just release a 2014.2.0.1 version
soon then.

> [...] 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.

Although this is a totally subjective feeling (based on the very
subjective impression on the installed user base), I think that a good
out-of-the-box support for Macs is more important than FreeBSD. And
what exactly does it mean that "we still use GCC 4.6" when Clang is
the default on FreeBSD 10.0?