A modest proposal (re the Platform)

[Páli Gábor János]

On Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 2:35 AM, George Colpitts
<george.colpitts at gmail.com> wrote:
> I don't see the point of releasing a new Platform version every
> X months if it doesn't add significant capability or fix significant bugs.

I can only comment on this from my perspective again.  On FreeBSD, we
(are trying to) track the Haskell Platform specifications strictly and
it is not worth the effort to have multiple versions of the same
package (I have been already providing binary packages for 2
architectures and 4 majors versions), so we are basically "locked" to
the versions of the HP libraries and tools.

For example, I could have appreciated a new release of HP, since it
would have allowed me to update the ports for the ALUT and OpenAL
package as they depend on OpenGL >= 2.9.0.0.  Similarly, a newer
version of alex and happy are also required by some of the maintained
packages, but until they are not updated as part of the Platform, I
cannot really update them.  (Unless if I decided to patch them to work
with the older versions -- if I could.)

Over 530 maintained packages, it is becoming a quite interesting game
if the base set of libraries (but curiously, not the compiler) are
lagging a year behind.