Haskell Platform support in Gentoo

[Mark Lentczner]

First and foremost, the packagers for a specific OS distribution should
know best how to match the needs and customs of their constituent
communities. It is not uncommon for packaging to end up shipping something
slightly patched from an official release of a program. And, if it is the
custom of a distribution to always have the bleeding edge, they might ship
a different revision that what is considered "stable".

For OS distributions that don't take the binary artifacts directly - The
Platform serves as a list of packages and versions to package. Debian
packaging takes this approach. If there needs to be some version skew, this
is fine, as long as it takes into account our aim:

We want form a set of common stability points. Many library maintainers
take the approach that they support the last three GHC releases. With the
upcoming alignment of HP and GHC releases, we hope that they will include
all the packages in the HP as part of that "stability point".

As such, if an OS distribution is going to stray from the exact package
versions, it should be assess if it is going to potentially break code:
Either because the API has changed, and code no longer compiles (or worse,
compiles but doesn't work), or because a library maintainer using that OS
might think their release works on that version of GHC/HP, but doesn't on
other systems. Typically, any patch level update is safe (1.2.0.1 ->
1.2.0.2). Minor updates are possibly okay (1.2.0.1 -> 1.2.1) for users, but
might trip up library developers.

For a source based distro, like Gentoo, the "stability point" concept
should guide you. When a user thinks they have "GHC & HP 7.10.2" - they
should be getting that "stability point" - even if it is a little fuzzy.

I don't understand how Gentoo works - and I leave that for Alexander - but
how does it deal with GHC? Does that have the same lag problem? Do systems
like Python 2.7 also have this issue?

- Mark
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