Friends —
Deep apologies for being so out of touch the last two months(*).
In theory, we should be rev'ing up to produce Haskell Platform 2013.4.0.0,
but I'd like to explore our options at this time:
*1) Proceed as normal:* Such a release would use GHC 7.6.3, as did HP
2013.2.0.0, since that is still the current GHC release. Hence all the core
library versions would remain the same, and by my rough eyeballing it, half
the platform libraries would remain the same. The only big change might be
OpenGL/GLUT libs, which has bumped a major version... though I don't know
if that API change is too great or not. Given the time frame, we are
unlikely to have any additional packages.
This stance brings up the issue that 7.6.3, out of the box, won't work with
Xcode 5, and hence the upcoming release of OS X Mavericks (10.9).
*2) Delay a month:* This would give us time to consider new packages, which
would make the release somewhat more valuable. However, a December release
is hard due to holidays, so likelihood would be late December, or January
release.
*3) Ask GHC Central to produce 7.6.4:* This would incorporate the changes
needed work with Xcode 5. This would clearly involve a month delay as in #2.
*4) Skip it:* We could just decide that 2013.4.0.0 doesn't offer enough
value to run the process now, and simply focus our efforts this cycle on
improving the infrastructure that builds HP.
Thoughts? I'm particularly interested to hear from HP library maintainers
to know if there was/is something important to get out in an HP ASAP. I'd
also like to better understand what our Xcode5 options are, and if/how/when
we could see the latest cabal in the platform.
Again, sorry that this small HP timing crisis is mostly my fault,
— Mark
(*) At least my excuse is that I was writing music with Haskell for those
two months!
