I'm new here, and I was wondering why some compilers are updated so rarely. For example:
- GHC 6.10.4 is dated July 2009. Luckily, it was still on the home page when I looked.
- Free Pascal 2.2.4 is dated March 2009. I found a tiny reference to it on Wikipedia.
- GCC 4.3.2 was released in August 2008.
- Guile 1.8.5 was released in May 2008 -- the only evidence of it ever existing was its original announcement on the GNU mailing list.
- ocamlopt 3.10.2 is dated March 2008 -- I had to search through the archives to find this one!
I find this astounding, especially for Haskell and OCaml, both languages which are evolving very quickly. The Haskell 2010 Report, which has many improvements to the language, was just released last year. Both languages are heavily dependent on optimizations that have improved much over the last two years.
It shouldn't be too hard updating these packages with something like
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade
on Debian. With little effort, it should be possible to write a shell script to do all this automatically.
If we need to test the compilers work before deploying them, we can have a separate computer that installs and tests the languages individually and logs the results. When the time comes, a sysadmin can look over the test results and, if there are no problems, trigger an upgrade on the main server.
Users will win because they will get the latest and greatest implementations. Admins will win because they are relieved of the chore of upgrading the languages themselves. Sounds good? I think it does 
