Dear list, I have written a package, reactive-banana-wx, which seems to be quite enticing to Haskell beginners. It's an implementation of the fabled functional reactive programming (FRP), so it's natural that people want to play around with it to see what it is all about. I imagine that the latest parallelism packages also serve a similar audience. Of course, to play around with a package, you have to be able to install it, hopefully painlessly. As the maintainer, I have adopted the following principles as they appeared sound to me: 1. My package installs and works without any hitch on the latest Haskell Platform. This is easier said than done, because one of my dependencies is wxHaskell, which tends to have hitches at times. Occasionally, I restrict the version number to a specific, older wxHaskell version that I know to be bug free. In other words, the idea is that a complete Haskell beginner will be able to install my package with the standard setup even if he knows nothing about the Haskell ecosystem. 2. If the user has a setup that doesn't fit the dependencies I prescribe, then I expect him to change the version constraints himself (and hopefully tell me whether it works.) The idea is that having a non-standard setup is an indication that the user is no longer a beginner, so I can expect him/her to know how to change version constraints. With these principles in mind, imagine my surprise, then, to discover that the "Haskell Platform" on Ubuntu 12.04 includes GHC 7.4.1 http://packages.ubuntu.com/precise/haskell-platform Clearly, this must be a fake Haskell Platform, because the latest real Haskell Platform is still at GHC 7.0.4 at the time of this writing. Unfortunately, my principle 1 is now rendered moot. I don't quite know what to do. I understand that there is a need to get the latest GHC into the standard setup, but creating a "fake" Haskell Platform seems like a mistake to me, as it contradicts the use case "complete Haskell beginner" I described above. Not to mention that I'm stuck with the "real" Haskell Platform on Mac OS X and would have to manage separate cabal installations if I want to thoroughly test my package for all compiler versions. Or is it my principles that need to change? Best regards, Heinrich Apfelmus -- http://apfelmus.nfshost.com