5.04.2 schedule?

[Simon Marlow]

> > We're wondering here whether we should push out 5.04.2=20
> soon, or wait a
> > while and see what other bugs turn up.
> >
> > Opinions, anyone?
>=20
> Release often, release soon! Why not put out a source distribution
> on a regular basis, say, every month or so (I realize that binary
> distributions are a lot of work).

I'm a big fan of "release early, release often" too, but we have to
balance that against stability and putting out releases that people can
actually use.

In the past we used to have a distinction between source and binary
releases, but it didn't work too well: people used to make packages of
the source releases, blurring the distinction, and in any case binary
packages always pop out of the end of the nightly build, so building
them isn't any extra hassle.  Other packages, RPMs and so on are built
by others.  What really takes time is all the things that have to be
done for a release: testing, updating bits with the new version number,
updating web pages, uploading documentation, and so on.  It takes about
a day of my time to do a release, more if it's a major release (because
then we have to do release notes).

So I think the current situation is a good compromise: those who want
the bleeding edge can get CVS and watch cvs-ghc@haskell.org so they can
see when the compiler is stable, and we put out stable releases every
couple of months or so.

Cheers,
	Simon