On Fri, Feb 08, 2013 at 02:28:20PM +0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
So I think, if anything, there's pressure to have fewer major releases of GHC. However, we're doing the opposite: 7.0 to 7.2 was 10 months, 7.2 to 7.4 was 6 months, 7.4 to 7.6 was 7 months. We're getting too efficient at making releases!
7.2 was billed as a "technology preview" rather than a regular stable release. However, it still required just as much effort as a regular stable release, both for us (we probably spent just as much time trying to make it bug-free, making builds, making docs, etc) and for the community (libraries still needed to adjust dependencies etc). One result of that extra effort was that the 7.4 release got delayed, and the delay was magnified by pushing it over the Christmas period. 7.6 was released roughly according to the regular yearly release plan (although the 7.4 delay made the gap between the two shorter). So in my opinion, 7.2 was a bad idea (but I don't think anyone knew that before we tried it), and I'd agree that we'd be better sticking to not-more-than-yearly major releases. I wouldn't oppose less-than-yearly (e.g. every 18 months) if that makes life easier for distros, library maintainers, the HP, etc. But I wouldn't advocate it either; from GHC's point of view, historically we've always had enough new stuff to justify a new major release after a year. Thanks Ian -- Ian Lynagh, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/