Re: Dependencies/backwards compatibility in Hackage

Hi

With version numbers, it suffices that each author has a rule of incrementing at a certain level if compatibility is broken. It need not be the same level for different packages (though that would be less confusing). They might have two levels of compatibility: merely adding functions, types or classes will not break any clients that use explicit imports.

We can of course automate this with haddock --hoogle and diff quite easily. It doesn't get it perfectly - if the author changes the semantics or introduces a type alias it won't give the right result, but it should get the answer most of the time. Thanks Neil