Many people are asking why GHC 7.6 isn&#39;t in the platform and when it will be.<div><br></div><div>As the Platform is intended to be a stable, &quot;just install it and it works&quot; solution - we want to include GHC version that is stable with respect to the community. This means that before we freeze the package version selections for a platform release, there needs to be enough time for packages to settle into a stable, consistent version set. We want this not only for the packages in the platform, but also for packages commonly installed from hackage.</div>

<div><br></div><div>Since GHC provides almost half the packages in the platform, a new GHC version is a fair bit of version upheaval. GHC 7.6 was released September 6th, which gave only four weeks before the 2012.4.0.0 version freeze, which I didn&#39;t think was enough time. We might have been able to stabilize the platform&#39;s packages... but I&#39;m still seeing people having version problems with 7.6 and some hackage packages.</div>

<div><br></div><div>I was probably too conservative with the schedule this time round. <a href="http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/ReleaseTimetable">Next release</a> I&#39;ve pull in some phases, and tried to make it a little more speedy. The version freeze date is <b>April 8th, 2013</b> for a release <b>May 6th, 2013</b>. Whatever GHC is available <b>early-February</b> should be stable enough: It will give enough time for both the platform packages, and common hackage packages to adapt to it.</div>

<div><br></div><div>If the community would like the platform to use a GHC that is released <i>in</i> February, then the platform team needs a) some advanced notice so we can start contacting package maintainers early, and b) support of the community to get common hackage packages working with that release before the April 8th date.</div>

<div><br></div><div>- Mark</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Mon, Nov 5, 2012 at 11:54 PM, Mark Lentczner <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:mark.lentczner@gmail.com" target="_blank">mark.lentczner@gmail.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br>

<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">I&#39;m pleased to announce that <a href="http://www.haskell.org/platform/index.html#2012.4.0.0" target="_blank">Haskell Platform 2012.4.0.0</a> is now available.<div>

<br></div><div>This release contains three new packages to the platform:</div>
<ul><li><a href="http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/async-2.0.1.3/doc/html/index.html" target="_blank">async-2.0.1.3</a><br></li><li><a href="http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/split-0.2.1.1/doc/html/index.html" target="_blank">split-0.2.1.1</a><br>


</li><li><a href="http://vector-0.10.0.1http://lambda.haskell.org/platform/doc/current/packages/vector-0.10.0.1/doc/html/index.html" target="_blank">vector-0.10.0.1</a><br></li></ul><div>The remainder of the changes are small updates to the versions of GHC (now 7.4.2) and several other packages.<br>


</div><div><br></div><div>Installers for <a href="http://www.haskell.org/platform/windows.html" target="_blank">Windows</a>, <a href="http://www.haskell.org/platform/mac.html" target="_blank">Mac OS X</a>, and the <a href="http://www.haskell.org/platform/linux.html" target="_blank">source tar ball</a> are all now available from the site. Linux distribution packages should be available shortly.</div>


<div><br></div><div>On behalf of the <a href="http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/Members" target="_blank">Haskell Platform team</a>, </div><div> - Mark &quot;mzero&quot; Lentczner, Release Manager</div><div><br>

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