GHC 7.x

Created by: gwils

Do you intend to support older GHC versions with this tool, such as those in the GHC 7 family? I would really like at least 7.10, but further back would be better.

@gwils ideally, all that needs to be done for this is to extend the .available-versions and .download-urls accordingly (and test it actually works)

Another problem might be that supporting a huge range of GHC will likely make ghcup compile break due to different configs or other things.

I personally have no use for 7.10 and I doubt any newcomer will. What would you use it for?

GHC 7.10 is only 3 years old, it would be nice to support it. Obviously a line has to be drawn somewhere, though.

Created by: gwils

@mitchellwrosen Right. I stop caring at all below 7.4. I'm sure this number varies per person. I think a lot of people would stop caring below 8.2 for example.

I personally have no use for 7.10 and I doubt any newcomer will. What would you use it for?

Note that ghcup is not targetting exclusively newcomers... and I for one even still need to use GHC 7.0.4 here and there... :-)

Another problem might be that supporting a huge range of GHC will likely make ghcup compile break due to different configs or other things.

This will become a problem sooner or later anyway as we accumulate more future releases; so we better make the compatibility information encoded in the metadata expressive & accurate enough sooner rather than later; that's what I was already trying to hint at in my comment at https://github.com/haskell/ghcup/pull/44#issuecomment-437824802

I for one want to see support going back at the very least till GHC 7.8.4 and ideally till GHC 7.4.2

Created by: gwils

I have installed some GHC binaries manually on Fedora, and 7.8.4 is the last one that works. Starting with GHC 7.6.3, they give errors about libgmp.so.3 not being present.

mentioned in issue ghcup-hs#280