| 23 Oct 2024 |
 jean-paul. | yes, seems likely I guess. | 11:05:27 |
 emily | why we use Stackage LTS rather than nightlies I can't speak to – IIRC years ago the nightlies were often missing a bunch of stuff because of churn? the Nixpkgs Haskell maintainers would have to answer that one | 11:05:44 |
| emily | there is tooling that lets you use arbitrary versions | 11:05:59 |
| emily | just not in Nixpkgs | 11:06:02 |
| emily | haskell.nix etc. | 11:06:16 |
| jean-paul. | yea, I played that game before. nicer than haskellPackages from nixpkgs, not as nice in other ways ... Guess I'll see how bad it is to switch my app down to 0.4. | 11:11:24 |
 maralorn | jean-paul.: emily Looks like you figured it out, already. But just fyi I put an explanation about which versions we have into the nixpkgs manuals Haskell section. | 11:22:00 |
| emily | so nightly is avoided because it's smaller basically? | 11:22:17 |
| maralorn | No, nightly is avoided because stern.i and I can’t stay students forever. | 11:22:57 |
| emily | heh | 11:23:20 |
| maralorn | A few years back, when we had more capacity we lived on nightly for a while. And it was actually better in some regard. | 11:24:11 |
| maralorn | Because when the age gap between our stackage and hackage is lower, that breaks less packages outside of stackage. | 11:24:37 |
| emily | right | 11:24:48 |
| emily | isn't 9.8 the default compiler too? so we're technically going against Stackage LTS there? | 11:24:58 |
| emily | or maybe it isn't and I'm imagining things | 11:25:03 |
| emily | I'm going senile in the Haskell retirement home 😅 | 11:25:19 |
| maralorn | But at this point we only do the update when stackage LTS forces us, because switching to a new LTS is an uncalculatable mountain of work. Maybe around 2 fulltime weeks. Which we can’t just slip in casually. | 11:26:55 |
| maralorn | * But at this point we only do the update when stackage LTS forces us, because switching to a new snapshot is an uncalculatable mountain of work. Maybe around 2 fulltime weeks. Which we can’t just slip in casually. | 11:27:08 |
| emily | and nightly was painful because it was smaller amounts of work but much more frequently? | 11:27:27 |
| maralorn | No, thats not the problem. | 11:27:56 |
| maralorn | Just switching from LTS to nightly is so costly. | 11:28:11 |
| maralorn | And then when that nightly becomes the new LTS switching to the next nightly. | 11:28:30 |
| emily | right, okay. | 11:28:44 |
| emily | what makes the bumps so painful? applications breaking because they depend on stuff outside of Stackage that breaks? stuff needing patching/deps updating because of cabal2nix infelicities? | 11:28:54 |
| maralorn | I think it is a similar amount of work, probably slightly higher because generally the later we switch the more the ecosystem has already adapted. | 11:29:07 |
| maralorn | And mostly the point where nightly bumps to the next ghc is too early for us to follow so we wait a bit, and then there is no good point. So we fall back to LTS. | 11:30:05 |
| maralorn | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
what makes the bumps so painful? applications breaking because they depend on stuff outside of Stackage that breaks? stuff needing patching/deps updating because of cabal2nix infelicities? It’s a flag day kinda problem. All kinds of small pains all happening at the same time summing up. I don’t think it has much to do with cabal2nix. It’s mainly that a lot of packages outside of stackage are not compatible with the new stackage out of the box. That’s rarely because they use a ghc feature that change and often because of some kind of breakage in the core libraries. | 11:32:02 |
| maralorn | Lately mtl dropping re-exports was a major pain. | 11:32:21 |
| maralorn | In reply to @emilazy:matrix.org
what makes the bumps so painful? applications breaking because they depend on stuff outside of Stackage that breaks? stuff needing patching/deps updating because of cabal2nix infelicities? * It’s a flag day kinda problem. All kinds of small pains all happening at the same time summing up. I don’t think it has much to do with cabal2nix. It’s mainly that a lot of packages outside of stackage are not compatible with the new stackage out of the box. That’s rarely because they use a ghc feature that changed and often because of some kind of breakage in the core libraries. | 11:32:44 |
| emily | yep, makes sense. I was thinking nightly would be more rolling-release, but I guess it's more like nightlies are just alpha versions of the next LTS, so you still eat a whole bunch of breakage all at once? | 11:32:44 |
