Where to find releases?

[joneshf]

I noticed (while wanting to use the pre-built binaries), that there aren't any pre-built binaries here. Where should we download them?

In particular, I'm looking for a binary that is compatible with dhall version 1.15.1. I guess that would be 1.0.11. Is that right?

[Gabriella439]

@joneshf: There actually are pre-built statically-linked tarballs for dhall-text now that we've merged into the dhall-haskell project. You can find the latest one here:

https://hydra.dhall-lang.org/job/dhall-haskell/master/tarball-dhall-text/latest

However, that is not built against dhall-1.15.1. If you really want to do that I can help with that but in general for the purpose of building tarballs for releases we always build against latest versions of each package.

[joneshf]

Cool! How would someone choose a specific version instead of the latest build? It doesn't necessarily have to be 1.0.11. But, we can't depend on the latest build as it will have a breaking change at some point and we don't want that for our CI.

The reason I mentioned 1.15.1 is a bit complicated. The short version is that we're using dhall-text at version 1.0.11. We can upgrade to 1.0.13 (or whatever the version will be from dhall-haskell), but that would requiring dealing with whatever breaking changes happened to Dhall since then. We were hoping for an alternative location for 1.0.11 that wasn't nix–like how dhall-json has binaries to download from GitHub. If the path forward is to upgrade our Dhall code, that's what we'll do.

[Gabriella439]

@joneshf: For specific versions you will have to use the releases page of the dhall-haskell project. I plan to include statically linked binary tarballs for all four of dhall{,-text,-bash,-json} in future releases. However, I don't plan to backport binary tarball support for older versions preceding those packages being merged into this repository so you will need to upgrade if you want to use the statically-linked binary tarballs served in the next release.

Hydra does support preserving old builds and providing stable links to them, but I don't plan to use it (mainly to keep Hydra's disk utilization low). This is why I prefer to use the GitHub release page for binary tarballs.