From: mark.lentczner@gmail.com
Date: Tue, 6 Nov 2012 08:41:29 -0800
To: haskell-platform@projects.haskell.org; libraries@haskell.org; haskell-cafe@haskell.org; haskell@haskell.org
Subject: Re: [Haskell] Announce: Haskell Platform 2012.4.0.0
Many people are asking why GHC 7.6 isn't in the platform and when it will be.
As the Platform is intended to be a stable, "just install it and it works" solution - we want to include GHC version that is stable with respect to the community. This means that before we freeze the package version selections for a platform release, there needs to be enough time for packages to settle into a stable, consistent version set. We want this not only for the packages in the platform, but also for packages commonly installed from hackage.
Since GHC provides almost half the packages in the platform, a new GHC version is a fair bit of version upheaval. GHC 7.6 was released September 6th, which gave only four weeks before the 2012.4.0.0 version freeze, which I didn't think was enough time. We might have been able to stabilize the platform's packages... but I'm still seeing people having version problems with 7.6 and some hackage packages.
I was probably too conservative with the schedule this time round. Next release I've pull in some phases, and tried to make it a little more speedy. The version freeze date is April 8th, 2013 for a release May 6th, 2013. Whatever GHC is available early-February should be stable enough: It will give enough time for both the platform packages, and common hackage packages to adapt to it.
If the community would like the platform to use a GHC that is released in February, then the platform team needs a) some advanced notice so we can start contacting package maintainers early, and b) support of the community to get common hackage packages working with that release before the April 8th date.
- Mark
On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Mark Lentczner