[darcs-users] ghc support policy

[Trent W. Buck]

Below is a summary of the GHC status in Debian and Ubuntu, and the
release and EOL schedules of those distributions.

Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 09:43:16 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote:
>> Are we still actively supporting 6.4?
>
> On December 2006, we had a policy of supporting
> - whatever Debian stable has

The current Debian Stable release contains GHC 6.6.  Lenny (which will
become the Stable release Real Soon Now) contains 6.8 on all platforms
but GNU Hurd and Motorola 68k.

> - the second to last major point release of GHC
> http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-devel/2006-December/005249.html
>
> I'm not sure what caused us to revisit this policy.  Perhaps one
> factor may have been an offhand remark by Zooko on 2008-05 that one of
> his users was still on Dapper Drake (now well over 2 years old) and
> could not build darcs 2.0.0 from source.
> http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2008-May/012235.html

In April 2008, the stable Ubuntu LTS release changed from 6.06 (Dapper)
to 8.04 (Hardy).  I suspect by now the majority of Ubuntu LTS users will
have migrated to the latter release, however 6.06 will not reach
end-of-life (EOL) until June 2009.  Note that GHC is in the Ubuntu
"universe" repository; thus it DOES NOT receive the "long term support"
for which LTS is named.

Hardy contains GHC 6.8 on all platforms.

References:

 https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases
 http://packages.debian.org/ghc6
 http://packages.ubuntu.com/ghc6