On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 10:44 AM, Yitzchak Gale <[email protected]> wrote:

> 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.
>

Darcs uses as many libraries as it can to avoid homegrown solutions.  Until
all of those have stable versions in the Haskell Platform it seems unlikely
that we'll have a darcs release that depends on only the Haskell Platform
and no other parts of Hackage.  Currently the HP is rather small in terms of
the libraries it bundles.  It will grow, but given the pipeline below, it
could take years to get there and even then if it follows a Debian release
style it could feature older versions that darcs HEAD doesn't work with :)

The other thing I wanted to point out about the HP.  It adopts GHC versions
with quite a bit of lag.  The first release of the HP to bundle GHC 6.12
won't happen till later this month, but 6.12 was released December 14th of
2009.  I believe the pipeline is: GHC release -> HP release -> Debian
unstable -> Debian Testing -> Debian Stable -> Debian Stable release.  Each
of those arrows adds quite a bit of lag time.

What you suggest with darcs relying on the HP is not impossible, but I
reckon it's a long ways away still.

Jason
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