[darcs-users] GHC 6.8?

Trent W. Buck twb at cybersource.com.au
Wed Mar 17 23:35:30 UTC 2010


Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> writes:

> 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 maintain Debian's Darcs package.

My job[0] is to try to get releases into unstable promptly, and to
ensure that the version that gets frozen into each stable release is
*stable*.  In Darcs' case, that usually means the latest release as at
freeze time (not counting alpha/beta/rc/prereleases).

Backporting the latest Darcs (or GHC) to a stable Debian release is not
my job.  Right now I don't do it, because I have no personal interest,
and better things to do with my time.  If you want official Darcs
backports (i.e. backports.org) enough to donate resources (i.e. time or
money) to the task, I'm happy to be involved.


On to version support.  Per the above, what *I* want is for a Darcs
release to support the GHCs in testing and unstable at the time of that
release.  The GHC in stable only relevant to official backporters;
unofficial backports can bootstrap a newer GHC.

I suspect some confusion has arisen because until very recently (like, a
week ago) both stable and testing shipped GHC 6.8.  Thanks to the
sterling work of the debian-haskell group, testing now ships GHC 6.12.


On to excuses.  Debian packaging of 2.3 onwards requires GHC >=6.10,
because I figured testing users could stand to wait a few weeks until
6.10 migrated to testing.  It turned out that 6.10 never even made it to
testing!  Darcs 2.3 *still* isn't available in testing due to the recent
mmap 0.4 vs. 0.5 fuckup.  Today I see the the mmap 0.4 package has made
it through the NEW queue, so I can roll a 2.4 using it.  Hopefully that
package will propagate to testing quickly.


[0] My job also includes a bunch of other stuff like handling bug
    reports and coördinating with the rest of Debian.



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