Yes, I try it out sometimes.  And if it works, great.  If not, too bad, I'll wait until the next Haskell Platform.  I don't whine about it in public.

May I venture a guess that you never tried to manage a 5-10 million line project?

That's what I do. I'm not a programmer, I'm a manager. I run teams of a few dozen people on subprojects within huge telecom-related projects, and my job is to try and keep it all from collapsing in a heap of bugs. 

If you had any experience of that you'd run a mile from any technology with this hit and miss attitude. I can't tell people what version they should be using because half of them work for a completely different company. They have their own dependencies coming from other projects that I'm not even allowed to know about. One of the ways I keep codebases alive is by telling people not to assume that somebody else is following the instructions in their heads. If anybody in my team wants to assume anything about the versions of anything they interact with, they'll need a very good argument as to why they can't make their bit more flexible. But I never had to be scared of upgrading any compiler, except python that is.

Is anybody in the Haskell community still interested in attracting new users? If so I suggest you go play with Ruby on Rails. Then you'll know what it's like to approach a complex and unfamiliar system where every crumb requires a precise version of every other. If you had my job, you'd find out what you needed to know within half an hour.
 

 
So I installed 7.4.2 from source but that confused cabal because my attempt to uninstall the ubuntu package with 7.4.1 in had failed with dependency-hell. Figuring out why (or even that) my packages weren't being seen was the puzzle I was referring to.

So the complaint is about Ubuntu?

I think we all know that package management is tricky and ubuntu are struggling, but that would be another topic.
 
 
The point is that we wouldn't have to be talking about this at all if people didn't move the furniture around all the time. 

That's not a very good point. It sounds as though you're the one who moved furniture around, considering that you managed to mix up Ubuntu's GHC package with your hand-built ones.


Well now you're just playing with words. I've already explained how it happened.