What to do with older GHCs.

[phadej]

From https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Ubuntu Bionic (18.04) is EOL. On Ubuntu Focal (20.04) there are some GHC missing (there is GHC 7.0 and 7.2 in hvr ppa; and GHC-7.10+; in ghcup the GHC-7.10 is IIRC broken (required some post install patching). On Ubuntu Jammy there are only GHC-8.4+ (in ghcup, there are no hvr ppa for jammy).

Recently, GHA started warning about newer nodejs, forcing to update the action versions (checkout, cache). These work on focal, but don't on bionic (erroring with /__e/node20/bin/node: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.28' not found (required by /__e/node20/bin/node)).

Even if it worked, Bionic is EOL.

So what to do?

A cleanest solution is to drop support for older GHCs. At least GHC-7. I think it's time, I have holding up with these for as long as possible, but now the issue is quite hardly forced.

So, soon, I will remove GHC-7 support from haskell-ci.

If you have comments, any good ideas, please comment.

Ping @RyanGlScott, as you are probably the only one running extensive CI setups with GHC-7. I only do because I could, but I'd be fine dropping GHC-7 support as I do sweep across packages updating for GHC-9.10.

--

GHC Version 8.0. 1 (released 21st May 2016), that's a long time ago.

[RyanGlScott]

I am fine with dropping GHC 7.* support. I've been expecting this to happen for a while now, and I agree that it's becoming increasingly hard to maintain support for these versions.