Why can't we just update to ghc 7.0.4 for now? Nothing will break, look at the bugfixes: http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.4/html/users_guide/release-7-0-3.html BTW Fedora is doing a better job with Haskell then Arch now. they updated to 7.0.4 and are supporting a lot more packages. And now we are dropping packages. I think haskell packages are indeed a bit trickier then normal c/c++/python/etc libraries and packages, since their dependencies seems to be much stronger. And keep in mind "rolling release" does not mean "unstable" or "testing", it just means that we don't have releases but the system must always work and must be stable. "Bleeding edge" in an unfortunate expression. It we are going to be a "experimental" with 7.2.2 (which I think it's a mistake) we have to have a mechanism to ensure that at least a set of important packages used in production will never break, that there are quite a few of them.