On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 10:33:39AM -0800, Johan Tibell wrote:
It's the only model I believe scales to e.g. executables that depend on thousands of packages
Debian has approximately 30,000 packages (although admittedly I don't know how many are libraries), and only needs a single version of each package. Having a single version of each package (with Hackage using a system similar to Debian's releases and 'testing' to define the sets of package versions) would make life a lot easier: Library maintainers don't need to worry so much about keeping packages working with old versions of their dependencies. Authors know that they can use any 2 packages together, and not have to worry about one of those packages depending on foo 1.* and the other depending on foo 2.*. The intractible problem of testing all combinations of versions of dependencies, to ensure that packages really do build in all the circumstances that they claim they do, disappears. Thanks Ian