Re: Request to reopen the issue of 7.8 on El Capitan

I'll see if I can bake a build from source myself and share it. On Tuesday, October 13, 2015, Austin Seipp wrote:

I wasn't aware it completely broke on El Capitan, but I think that's a pretty extreme case (where a completely usable release simply breaks because a hugely popular OS changes) that would warrant a 7.8.5 release, to be honest. Presumably, this would really be the only change, so mostly OS X users would be affected by its availability.

In general people like to use the last 3 GHC releases anyway, and we haven't even *released* 8.0 yet. And at that point, 7.8.x will be the last 'in the chain' - so I can assume people would _still_ want 7.8 on OS X presumably, even more than a year from today until 8.2!

At that point (8.2-ish era) if Apple keeps breaking things, we may not do another release, but in this case I think the timescale for user/library support is probably worth it. Otherwise OS X users are going to have to fix it themselves, and it might be ugly (propagating random fixes around the internet isn't going to work well, and we'll just keep getting bug reports about this because of that - we've already done this dance with OS X.)

I'll note this down and think about it more this week, since we'd like to get 7.10.3 out soon as well...

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7.8.4 is was released only ten months ago; it surprises me that we'd consider it acceptable to have such a recent release fail to work on new machines when the fix is so small as to not even require a patch to the source tree. In particular, I remember hearing proponents of 7.10's changes reassure detractors that if they choose, they can continue to use 7.8.4, which is no longer an option.

I'd ask that we (1) reconsider the decision to stop 7.8 releases, and (2) if we stand by the decision, document the mitigations for users who would

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Adam Foltzer javascript:;> wrote: like

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to build their own working version of the compiler. I just finished a build from a source dist with `unix-2.7.1.0` and it still triggers the El Capitan error, so I suspect it's not as simple as just dropping the new package into `/libraries/unix/`.

On Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 4:19 PM, Carter Schonwald javascript:;> wrote:

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There are no plans to do a new 7.8 release at this Time. Even doing a point release for 7.10.3 is still speculative.

We should reflect the capitan issue in the installation documentation. And or remark that only 7.10 or newer is supported on El Capitan.

If a user needs a 7.8 build that works on capitan, they will need to

build

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a source dist with an updated UNIX package.

On Tuesday, October 13, 2015, Adam Foltzer javascript:;> wrote:

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Hello,

The issue was brought up on this list [1] that the released versions of GHC 7.8 do not work on El Capitan due to an older `unix` package. In a subsequent GHC weekly news [2], it was announced that since El Capitan wasn't yet released, it wasn't worthwhile to put more developer time

into

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7.8.

Now that El Capitan is out, and the existing 7.8 binaries continue to not work, I'd like to reopen this issue and request a point release with an updated `unix` package.

Thank you,

Adam Foltzer Research Engineer Galois, Inc.

[1]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-July/009403.html [2]:

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/weekly20150721#MacOSXElCapitansupport

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-- Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/