Hi Claus, I've been trying (unsuccessfully) to avoid replying to every single message in this thread, however you raise a number of interesting things that we've not asked ourselves yet in this discussion. On Sun, 2009-05-10 at 23:00 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
I suspect this is too simple a picture of what people expect from the HP!-) Some examples:
You're right. We started with much too narrow a question that was laden with too many assumptions. It's right to look at the bigger picture (so long as it helps us come to some sort of conclusion! :-) )
- stability: used to be about language stability alone, but these days, libraries are a big part of the game, language standards are a bit slow in keeping up with language extensions, and GHC releases no longer come with a "standard" kitchensink of extensions and libraries
Here, the question is: can I write code/documentation wrt HP x.y.z, and will the combination remain accessible, useable, and relevant? And which stability problems does the HP not address/solve?
'relevant' is a particularly good word in this context. What does it mean for a release to remain relevant? I'd say that a release becomes *irrelevant* shortly after developers stop testing their packages against that releases. Given that we cannot expect developers to test against more than two or three releases then irrelevance is directly related to the frequency of releases. If we have bi-annual releases then a user could expect to stick with a single release for 12-18 months. On the other hand if we do quarterly releases then the time to irrelevance is significantly reduced. Duncan