Hi, On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 12:48:25PM -0500, Shea Levy wrote:

I'm wondering, why do we require ghc to be bootstrappable with the past 2 major releases instead of just the past 1? Is it a common case that someone is compiling GHC but can't easily get the latest release?

Well, I can't speak for those who made this decision, but supporting more than one major release eases the life of os distribution package maintainers, especially in cases where the distribution package had been left behind for too long, which may happen for many reasons, like a maintainer dropped maintainership and a new one has to be found first, or like a maintainer missing a major release because he's to busy or too lazy. (The latter sometimes applies to me ;-)) Ciao, Kili