Hi all, On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 09:43:16 -0700, Jason Dagit wrote: > Are we still actively supporting 6.4? Haven't the major linux > distributions moved on to 6.6 now? It looks like 6.6 was released a > full 2 years ago (the last release of the 6.4 series was in oct of > 2006). Also, unless someone is testing our builds on 6.4 it seems bad > to claim support for 6.4.
Flip-flopping ------------- On December 2006, we had a policy of supporting - whatever Debian stable has - 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 Or maybe we just had other anecdotal evidence that GHC 6.4 was still in use. Another thing to note is that we effectively no longer support GHC 6.4 on Windows (see src/Exec.lhs for details). We could easily enough, but we decided it wasn't worth the effort. Perhaps it is time to develop a clear policy on this issue and stick to it. As Zooko has suggested, we could even use the buildbots to reflect that policy, i.e. whatever we platforms we say we support being whatever platforms we have slaves for. Costs and breaks ---------------- For what it's worth, I am personally in favour of dropping support for GHC 6.4. There have already been a handful of recent cases where we have revisited code in order to preserve GHC 6.4 compatibility. * 2008-06-06: Darcs.Exec isInfixOf * 2008-04-10: Zooko's forM_ patch * 2008-01-12: Tommy's make_changelog fix * 2007-12-11: David's ghc 6.4 fixes These may seem like minor changes, but they are also compounded by other hidden costs: having our code be less friendly to new darcs hackers (because of the configure, ifdef and Workaround clutter), and giving us that extra little bit of hesitation whenever we make a technical decision (oh we could do this, but it would break compatibility). 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! :-) -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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