On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 6:17 PM, Bardur Arantsson <s...@scientician.net>
wrote:

> Yes, the rest of the ecosystem may move along and use the latest new
> shiny, but then you can always use the packages that worked with GHC
> 7.8.x thanks to version ranges.
>
> Am I missing something?
>

Updates needed to fix e.g. security issues, which otherwise might not be
backported if others are staying close to current. This is why Stackage has
both LTS and Nightly; LTS only works if there's a *commitment* to it, at
the level of the community for a community resource or at the level of the
provider for something like ghc or Stackage.

Note that GHC HQ's response was that they have had problems finding people
to keep multiple versions active at the same time; it's a significant job
given that backporting (say) a fix to a type system issue allowing
unexpectedly unsafe code (say, https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9858)
can mean a complete redesign of the patch, if the one in HEAD relies on
other changes that can't be sensibly backported.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allber...@gmail.com                                  ballb...@sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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