Dear #haskell people around here, can you remind me what is the release process / support of GHC?
I keep getting confused with the versions being released (they always feel like a lot of them to me 😂). Like, I'm on 9.6.6 -- can I stay on it and just update to 9.6.x? What am I missing out?
It makes me a bit anxious that this feels such a moving target 😅
Someone told me I could just use whatever Debian packages on stable and use that as a stable platform. Is that sound advice?
Thank you!
@reidrac there's no "tick-tock" or the lines in releases. Some major releases do stick (8.10, 9.6) and some don't.
Upgrading to a minor is usually a good thing and should take no extra maintenance effort.
@dpwiz I found this: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/GHC-status
That is kind of clear.
@reidrac Good one.
Personally I just stick to whatever the Stackage deems LTS since it has the most package coverage (by design). Typically they have LTS-3 support policy from which one can estimate lower bound for GHC majors still in play.
@dpwiz should I look into stackage? I've been focusing in cabal only, and so far it has been good. But I haven't looked at other options really.
@reidrac You can use Stackage snapshots as cabal freezes:
In cabal.project:
import: https://www.stackage.org/lts-22.43/cabal.config
Or wget it to cabal.project.freeze
@dpwiz Thank you! I'll read more about this, but looks interesting.