[darcs-users] ghc support policy

[Petr Rockai]

Hi,

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:
> The costs are not that huge, but on the balance I feel they outweigh the
> benefits of keeping GHC 6.4 support around.  As admirable a goal as it
> is to keep darcs working wherever people want to install it, we have
> reached a stage where it would better serve our users to focus on
> hacking darcs that keeping it fresh on old platforms.
>
> So let's make a clean break! :-)
I think that users without recent-enough GHC available would be better served
by self-contained (static?) builds that would run on (most) libc6-based systems
out of the box. Especially if we can provide a package with a single binary and
maybe the manual for a few platforms, that would likely cover more systems than
6.4 compatibility would (counting in those systems that don't have GHC handily
available as packages, cost of just unpacking darcs binary is much lower than
installing GHC, all darcs dependencies and then compiling it).

(Yes, a way for the buildbots to create such packages would be a boon here.)

Yours,
   Petr.

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation