2011/12/23 Bernardo Barros
Why can't we just update to ghc 7.0.4 for now? Nothing will break, look at the bugfixes:
Actually *everything* will break: every time we update ghc, we need to recompile every package depending on it (i.e. every haskell package). No matter what version we upgrade to.
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.
We are here to make Arch a better distro for Haskell.
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.
... with the last stable version available.
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.
That's exactly what cblrepo is used for? Am I wrong? It seems to me that the meaning of "testing" in 7.2 branch is about "new features that could change in 7.4"; it's not about "breaking 7.0 branch". What works with 7.0.4 should works as well with 7.2 (and actually do!). Look at this: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.2.2/html/users_guide/release-7-2-1.html. I made a testing repo and updated to ghc-7.2.2 some 100 packages, and everything looks okay. For me it's the same, we can use both 7.2.2 or 7.0.4. During Christmas holiday I have enough time to try and build most of packages for one of those. If Magnus agree. Witch version should I use? For now we have 1 vote for 7.2.2 (Magnus) and 1 for 7.0.4 (Bernardo). Fabio