[darcs-users] GHC 6.8?

[Yitzchak Gale]

Sittampalam, Ganesh wrote:
> following this policy would have implied keeping 6.6 support in HEAD
> until the 2.4 release branch forked at the end of December.

Well, as Eric pointed out, it could also have been done by having a separate
6.6 branch where you backport any darcs changes that affect interoperability.
It's completely reasonable not to support compiling HEAD for old-stable.

> I think that the Debian release frequency means that there will always
> be times when Debian Stable is two or three releases behind GHC.

In the future, I expect testing will always have the up-to-date Haskell
Platform when it goes stable, and stable may even get a backport
of the next version or two of HP. It's fine to require stable users to get
a few good quality packages from Debian backports to compile darcs
HEAD. Updated versions of darcs will anyway go into backports.

And on the other hand, as the Haskell Platform becomes more mature
and useful, the darcs team at some point will probably move that way
to lower the barrier of entry for potential contributors.

That convergence should reduce some of this pain in the future, hopefully.

Regards,
Yitz