First and foremost, the packagers for a specific OS distribution should know best how to match the needs and customs of their constituent communities. It is not uncommon for packaging to end up shipping something slightly patched from an official release of a program. And, if it is the custom of a distribution to always have the bleeding edge, they might ship a different revision that what is considered "stable".
For OS distributions that don't take the binary artifacts directly - The Platform serves as a list of packages and versions to package. Debian packaging takes this approach. If there needs to be some version skew, this is fine, as long as it takes into account our aim: We want form a set of common stability points. Many library maintainers take the approach that they support the last three GHC releases. With the upcoming alignment of HP and GHC releases, we hope that they will include all the packages in the HP as part of that "stability point". As such, if an OS distribution is going to stray from the exact package versions, it should be assess if it is going to potentially break code: Either because the API has changed, and code no longer compiles (or worse, compiles but doesn't work), or because a library maintainer using that OS might think their release works on that version of GHC/HP, but doesn't on other systems. Typically, any patch level update is safe (1.2.0.1 -> 1.2.0.2). Minor updates are possibly okay (1.2.0.1 -> 1.2.1) for users, but might trip up library developers. For a source based distro, like Gentoo, the "stability point" concept should guide you. When a user thinks they have "GHC & HP 7.10.2" - they should be getting that "stability point" - even if it is a little fuzzy. I don't understand how Gentoo works - and I leave that for Alexander - but how does it deal with GHC? Does that have the same lag problem? Do systems like Python 2.7 also have this issue? - Mark
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