[Haskell-cafe] Re: [darcs-users] Poll: Do you need to be able to build darcs from source on GHC 6.6?

On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Trent W. Buck wrote:

"Jason Dagit" writes:

...

Debian is nice in some ways and it's really great that stable lives up to its name, but I am sad that Debian has such old software for so long.

Those two properties are strongly correlated.

There is backports.org for cases where you want to cherry-pick a handful of packages for which stability is less important than newness. Of course, GHC 6.8 isn't on backports.org at present. That means either it's non-trivial to backport, or nobody has volunteered the time.

What is the cost/benefit for providing a backport? Suppose we wanted to provide a backport so that we could drop a dependency on old software. Could we realistically tell users to get an update from the backport? Then we still have OpenBSD users. I think we don't have a realistic solution other than to deal with the maintenance burden of supporting antique software. Thus I think the version/upgrade matrix is handy so we can plan/schedule when it is safe to drop support. Thanks! Jason