Good news!

We’ve got ghc-6.12.3 stable on x86, amd64 and sparc arches! (more to come)

What does it mean for end user?

You’ll get latest haskell compiler and will be able to taste it’s new features! We also got rid of hacky ghc-updater and switched to haskell-updater.

Unfortunately, some haskell packages in main tree might stop building on new compiler. Please report them as problematic to gentoo bugzilla or drop a line in #gentoo-haskell on freenode IRC network.

I’ve decided to look back and estimate timeframe it took us to deliver ghc for you:

12 Oct 2009 – GHC-6.12 RC1 appears in public

2 Nov 2009 – GHC-6.12 RC1 hits gentoo-haskell overlay

12 Jun 2010 – GHC-6.12.3 is released

26 Sep 2010 – GHC-6.12.3 goes stable on amd64

So, it took us almost 4 months.

The major problems were:

Resurrect GHC on exotic architectures (we have 10 patches on top of vanilla ghc!). Unfortunately, hppa support was lost.

on exotic architectures (we have 10 patches on top of vanilla ghc!). Unfortunately, support was lost. Fix packages breaking with 6.10/6.12 branch of ghc (tons of them)

Brave souls can try to install ghc-7-rc2 (aka 7.0.0.20101028) from overlay (currently masked). It has no base-3 (deprecated in ghc-6.10), so you’ll have great chance to become a contributor to various haskell projects!

Enjoy!