Mark, It seems we disagree about the fundamental issues. My stance is the following:
1) Current and future OS X releases of the HP should be buildable (including dependencies) on the current OS X release 2) We should avoid OS-specific hacks (like wrappers) and solve the underlying issues causing breakage And that's it. I understand that the HP does not re-build GHC and I understand that GHC, the HP, etc. need to work on multiple versions of OS X. But I also think it's possible to achieve portability in a cleaner fashion than relying on the proposed hacks. I don't know who makes the decisions about a 7.6.4 release. All I know is that there's been some discussion about it in private emails and some discussion on the #ghc IRC channel. As far as I understood, the primary impetus for such a release would be to provide a proper solution to GHC on 10.9. >From where I'm sitting, if the current version of the HP is not buildable on the current OS X, it's simply broken. What should be fixed upstream will end up becoming (and in fact already is) a problem for others downstream. This just exacerbates the current mess that we're in because I can promise you that different users and different groups downstream will find and suggest a variety different solutions. Not only is that's bad for people that want things to "just work", it potentially introduces more headaches for everyone involved since certain approaches may create new problems that users will seek support for. You mentioned earlier that you wanted to avoid a package-manager based solution so as to remain neutral. I agree wholeheartedly with this stance but I also think being neutral entails that everything works for the largest group of people possible. Many of those people will either try to compile the HP themselves (on 10.9, without GCC easily accessible), or install through one of the package managers. Perhaps they are not the majority, but they are important nonetheless, and they include many developers from other communities who are used to development on OS X but not Haskell development specifically. I think that's about all I can say on this. I'm not involved in the official releases or maintenance of the HP stuff so it's not my call. I'm happy to help in trying to find a solution that works for everyone. I'm just not convinced the current proposal does that. Cheers, Darin
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