ghc-7.4.2 and other updates/news

[dag.odenhall at gmail.com]

I personally think Platform is a bit incompatible with the Fedora
philosophy of "features" and "first". I don't think we need to be the
*bleeding* edge, but at least the *cutting* edge? I think people who
install and use [the latest] Fedora have already made a decision that they
want to experiment with the latest in software development, and usually
have the skill to do so. Those who just want something that works with
minimum fuzz and aren't too interested in trying out the latest GHC
features are likely to be running something other than Fedora, I suspect.

It seems Fedora releases are usually around two or three months behind GHC
releases, which is also about the time it takes for Hackage to stabilize to
a new GHC release. That's what I mean about cutting vs. bleeding edge.

Who wants to be stuck with GHC 7.4 for at least the next seven or eight
months? Who wants to have GHC 7.6 within the next month or two, at the cost
of not having the precise versions of packages specified in the latest
Platform?

I know my post on how to get GHC 7.4 in F17 has been very popular, and I'm
hoping we can avoid repeating this situation for GHC 7.6 and F18.

Just my two cents.

-- donri

On Mon, Oct 29, 2012 at 11:16 AM, Jens Petersen <petersen at redhat.com> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I want to update the SIG on various news:
>
> * ghc-7.4.2 and haskell-platform-2012.4
>
> I have started work locally testing updating rawhide to ghc-7.4.2
> and haskell-platform-2012.4 RC2.  If people want I can upload
> my local ghc-7.4.2 and haskell-platform builds for testing.
>
> Overall the results so far are fairly good.
> Only a few remaining packages have problems:
>
> - Agda (constructor issue)
> - happstack-server (blaze-html or new deps)
> - hledger-lib-0.19 needs shakespeare-text (review pending)
> - xss-sanitize (css-text not imported yet!)
>
> but they should be fixable by F19 time.
>
> I plan to build ghc-7.4.2 for Rawhide within the next week.
>
> * Updating packages to latest versions
>
> We have a lot of packages that need a version refresh.
> Now is a great time to bump your packages in git master.
> Building for rawhide is also ok but not really necessary right now
> since everything will need rebuilding shortly soon anyway.
> I really need your help with this, but if you don't have time to do it
> I will start touching packages generally in the coming week or so.
>
> * cabal-rpm update
>
> I have been using cabal-rpm to refresh a few packages by hand
> and I am going to release 0.6.5 soon with some smaller tweaks
> and improvements: the biggest visible change being no longer using
> version-ranged BRs since I think this has too much maintenance
> overhead at least until cabal-rpm can do updating of packages.
>
> * Haskell Platform and ghc versions
>
> I am wondering how closely we should follow Haskell Platform going
> forward since the releases are not well synced with Fedora's schedule
> and upstream so far refused to shift its schedule...
>
> As such I quite like following HP - it is gives us a certain stability
> and certainty of base versions, but also understand that some people
> want to have the latest versions available and live on the bleeding edge.
> Personally I am leaning towards doing more backporting - I am thinking
> to backport ghc-7.4.2 and haskell-platform-2012.4 to F18 for example
> (after it has gone to rawhide).  If there is demand we could also
> backport ghc-7.4.1 to F17 perhaps or I could make a yum repo for it
> from the F18 packages.  Ubuntu-12.10 just recently shipped with ghc-7.4.2.
>
> What do people think?  How important is it to have the official
> haskell-platform in Fedora?
>
> Another side issue is that I somewhat cavalierly made haskell-platform
> into a monolithic package in F18, thinking this would decrease its
> update/build time.
> This unfortunately means if we weren't going to follow HP closely we
> would probably need to re-review all the HP packages again... :-/
>
> Jens
> _______________________________________________
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>
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