[darcs-users] GHC 6.8?

Jason Dagit dagit at codersbase.com
Wed Mar 17 11:58:25 UTC 2010


On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:36 AM, Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 16, 2010 at 22:45:32 +0000, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> > After just going through a bit of pain with having to constrain dependent
> > packages to old versions for GHC 6.8.3, I found myself wondering how long
> > more we're going to support GHC 6.8 for. Do we have a policy on this
> > already? If not can we start discussing it?
>
> I think the current policy is to support whatever the current Debian
> stable provides (which is a patched GHC 6.8.2 at the moment).
>
> I've taken the liberty of documenting it here
>   http://wiki.darcs.net/Development/Policy
>
> I'm definitely keen to hear if there are ways we can loosen this
> without hurting Debian folks too much.  Maybe Darcs has reached a
> point where we can afford for people on Debian stable to just stick
> with old Darcs?
>

What is the rationale for this decision?

Here is my mental model:  It seems like people use Debian Stable if they
want a cohesive (but old) set of programs.  Given that assumption, I'm not
sure it makes a lot of sense for us to be concerned with whether or not the
darcs source builds there on the distro provided GHC.  Presumably these
folks want to install the stable darcs package and not build the latest and
greatest from source.

The main exception I know of to the above is that some people want to get
some version of darcs 2.x going on a linux virtual host that happens to
already be running Debian Stable.  For these people, uploading a binary is
probably ideal but not always possible.  Upgrading GHC can be even worse for
them due to compile times and the fact that the server might be under CPU
load.  The other exception I'm aware of, are people such as Juliusz who have
expressed an interest in building the latest and greatest to get bug fixes
while running older distros.

What version of darcs is currently in Debian Stable?  Is it one we feel is
reasonably bug free?


> Dumping old GHC would make me happy.
>

Me three.

Jason
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