On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 8:08 AM, Ian Lynagh
We've had long discussions about snapshot releases, and the tricky part is that while we would like people to be able to try out new GHC features, we don't want to add to the burden of library maintainers by requiring them to update their libraries to work with a new GHC release more than once a year.
But perhaps we should announce a "library API freeze" some time before the first RC on a stable branch. That way people can safely update their dependencies at that point, and by the time the RC is out people testing the RC will be able to test more without running into problems installing libraries.
What would be ideal would be if this "library API freeze" coincided with the snapshot (odd-numbered) release. Then library maintainers would only have to update once, and hopefully many of them would have their updates available before ghc's stable release. John L.