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Support Three Major Versions

Vincent Hanquez recently announced new releases of cryptonite, basement, and memory that work with GHC 9.2! This is great news! Support for some older versions of GHC is dropped, and he mentioned that he has a policy to support three major versions of GHC. Perhaps this policy is adopted from the decoupling base and GHC, with a concrete plan proposal, which I mentioned in the Haskell Breaking Changes blog entry.

Addition: There is a wiki page for the 3 release policy!

Here is the tweet, for reference:

#haskell new basement, foundation, memory, and cryptonite releases, with compatibility with ghc 9.2 now.

also dropped anything GHC < 8.8 .. as per 3-compilers-supported-policy (I realized after the fact that meant 8.8 also)

Here is the table from Haskell Breaking Changes, updated with new releases:

First Release Last Release base
8.0.1 (2016-05-21) 8.0.2 (2017-01-11) 4.9
8.2.1 (2017-07-22) 8.2.2 (2017-07-22) 4.10
8.4.1 (2018-03-08) 8.4.4 (2018-10-14) 4.11
8.6.1 (2018-09-21) 8.6.5 (2019-04-23) 4.12
8.8.1 (2019-08-25) 8.8.4 (2020-07-15) 4.13
8.10.1 (2020-03-24) 8.10.7 (2021-08-27) 4.14
9.0.1 (2021-02-04) 9.0.2 (2021-12-25) 4.15
9.2.1 (2021-10-29) 9.2.2 (2022-03-05) 4.16

The following table shows how long previous major versions would have been supported with this policy:

Version Days Years
8.0 853 2.3
8.2 764 2.1
8.4 747 2.0
8.6 867 2.4
8.8 796 2.2

Each major release is supported for about two to two and a half years. I still worry that this is insufficient for industry.

Author

Travis Cardwell

Published

Revised

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