Hello,

I think that there are a lot of useful features that are in HEAD that would be useful to a wider audience than GHC devs, so a release before October would certainly be useful.  I don't think it is that important if it is called 7.7.1 or 7.8.1 but I think that it needs to be a fixed version, in the sense that all code (including GHC libraries) is tagged in the repos and, possibly, we make an entry for it in the track system, so that people can record bugs against it.

Given that GHC is very actively developed, it might make sense to have one of these "snapshot" releases every 3 or so months, as "technology preview", and without any promises about stability or compatibility (in particular, they should not be considered for inclusion in the HP or standard Linux distributions).   This would give us a fairly low over-head middle ground between the volatility of nightly builds, and the long time between official releases.

-Iavor



On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 10:23 AM, Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:
A 7.7 snapshot would be useful for me in a number of ways: 

a) I often spend some time prior to recent GHC releases trying to build all the various major packages, and often send in patches to  maintainers during that window (or at least the start of patches). Having a fixed snapshot release that maintainers can use to validate any such future proofing patches would be tremendously helpful

b) Theres a bunch of engineering i'm currently up where I want to use some of the features very soon, and making it easier for other people to use the open source subsets of that engineering sooner rather than later would be valuable!

c) lowering the barrier to folks using and stress testing these features may catch problems sooner. 

note: i'm ok with compiling ghc from source, but many people who might be happy to test those new features might find that a bit daunting the first time.

cheers
-Carter


On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 6:58 AM, John Wiegley <johnw@fpcomplete.com> wrote:
>>>>> Ian Lynagh <ian@well-typed.com> writes:

> Would a 7.7.x recommended snapshot be useful to you? Tell us if you want
> one.

I think that could very useful, sort of like what the Linux kernel did before
they stopped.

I'm never sure if building from HEAD will produce a compiler I should use for
getting real work done, but I wouldn't have the same reservations concerning a
7.7.x "interim developer release".

--
John Wiegley
FP Complete                         Haskell tools, training and consulting
http://fpcomplete.com               johnw on #haskell/irc.freenode.net

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