On 2014-11-08 at 20:32:17 +0100, Howard B. Golden wrote: [...]
I am an interested observer, not an active developer, so take my comments with this in mind. I wonder if the release of 7.10 is being rushed. Perhaps once a year releases are too frequent for everyone except the bleeding edge, who may be satisfied with snapshots. Maybe a reallocation of developer effort should be considered. This question deserves to be considered even if it is ultimately discarded.
Fyi, last year there was already a discussion sub-thread debating a change of GHC's yearly major release cycle over at http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.glasgow.user/23425/focus=234... IIRC, the conclusion was basically that a yearly cycle is a good compromise balancing all needs/wishes involved. IMO, since GHC gains so many new features/improvements every year already, releasing less often would, for one, increase the amount of new (potentially non-backward compatible changes) features contained in a release, therefore increasing the work involved to update old code-bases to a new GHC release[1], while at the same time give less opportunity to get short release-feedback cycles (as Hackage developers probably only take serious proper stable GHC releases (candidates), rather than work-in-progress snapshots that are fast moving targets, potentially exhibiting all sorts of transient bugs). IOW, what I'm basically saying is that I'm a proponent of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Release_early,_release_often [1]: An *extreme* example of what can happen if you accumulate too many changes into a new compiler/language release is the Python3 situation, where it took ages for code-bases to get updated/ported from Python2 to Python3 (and it's still ongoing), as the upgrade path was too steep, while Python3 development was even slowed down for a few years by a self-imposed "Python Language Moratorium" to let Python3's adoption catch up. Cheers, hvr