Re: Meaning of version tags in cabal files

On Mon, 2010-01-18 at 21:41 +0000, C Rodrigues wrote:

I noticed that cabal will parse, but ignore, version tags.

Yes.

Arguably this is not the right thing to do, as it changes the semantics of versions.

It's precisely because the semantics of version tags is so useless (and inconsistent) that we stopped using them.

I'm not against discarding version tags, but I'd like to know if there's a rationale for _silently_ discarding them.

We've not yet removed tag from the parser for backwards compatibility. Clearly what we should do is add a big warning (or simply error) that such tags are no longer supported. I hope in time to get Data.Version changed to eliminate the tags entirely. Duncan