As I'm sure many people remember, we released LTS Haskell 1.0 at the beginning of January, and announced that the next major release would be just three months away, placing it at April 1 (no, that's not a joke). Now's a good time for a little status update, and an opportunity to discuss plans for LTS 2.

We've been running LTS minor builds on a weekly basis (in fact, as I type this, the 1.11 build is just finishing up). This process seems to be working out very well. Overall, new versions simply flow into the LTS builds, with occasional help to deal with funny version bounds issues. At FP Complete, we've started using LTS builds for both internal projects and client projects, and I've noticed a drastic decrease in version upgrade pain as a result.

So I'm quite happy to get ready for LTS 2, the first time we're doing a major version bump. There are two things I'd like to pull community attention to on that note:

  1. Please fix restrictive upper bounds, so that the newest versions of all libraries make it into LTS 2. (And, as always, feel free to get your packages into Stackage to make sure they're included in LTS 2. We're already well past 900 packages, and growing regularly.)
  2. It's time to think about what the time period on LTS 2 should be. We're at the 2.5 month mark on LTS 1, and I'm not hearing any complaints about maintenance burden or out-of-date package versions in LTS. I think now's a good time to increase our support window. I don't want to make this decision unilaterally, but would rather hear some community input on it. (Since it's going to happen there anyway, should we designate Reddit as the official forum to have that discussion? Discussion on the Stackage mailing list is good as well.)

Looking forward to hearing thoughts on this!

Subscribe to our blog via email
Email subscriptions come from our Atom feed and are handled by Blogtrottr. You will only receive notifications of blog posts, and can unsubscribe any time.

Do you like this blog post and need help with Next Generation Software Engineering, Platform Engineering or Blockchain & Smart Contracts? Contact us.