+1 I would appreciate this.
-- Dan Burton
On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Ben Gamari
TL;DR. We propose to start following the PVP for core libraries shipped with GHC alpha release. Let us know what you think.
Hello everyone,
GHC has recently been reworking its release policy, increasing the release cadence to two releases per year. We hope that this change facilitates earlier and more thorough testing of GHC. Of course, a compiler is worth little if no real-world packages can be built with it.
Historically library maintainers have been reluctant to offer releases claiming compatibility with pre-release GHCs due to the lax versioning guarantees offered by such pre-releases. Specifically, changes to libraries shipped with GHC pre-releases have historically not had proper distinct version numbers, causing unnecessary breakage for released code (e.g. [1]).
To make maintainers feel more at ease with releasing libraries compatible with GHC alpha releases, we propose to start using the Package Versioning Policy (PVP) [2] to version GHC's core libraries with each alpha release. That is, libraries which are not source-identical will get at very least a minor bump with each alpha release.
By "core libraries" we mean the set of:
* base * template-haskell * integer-gmp * integer-simple * hpc * ghci * ghc-compact * all GHC dependencies not maintained by GHC HQ * ghc-prim * ghc-boot * ghc-boot-th
Following the PVP will allow maintainers to safely release libraries to Hackage without fear that they will break when the final GHC 8.4.1 release is made, easing the testing process for everyone.
If you have an opinion one way or another on this matter please do share it on this list.
Cheers,
- Ben
[1] https://github.com/tibbe/hashable/issues/143 [2] https://pvp.haskell.org/
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