Re: [GHC DevOps Group] Fwd: Release policies

On 15 December 2017 at 16:32, Ben Gamari wrote:

"Boespflug, Mathieu" writes:

...

Thanks for the feedback, Michael.

Manuel, I believe you are also a Cabal-the-library consumer in Haskell For Mac?

Michael, you brought up another problem tangentially related to the original integer-gmp issue but that was not in my original list earlier in this thread:

* Cabal-2.0.0 had breaking changes in the API.

This means that by association GHC itself broke BC, because it shipped with Cabal-2.0, without the usual grace period.

I'm a bit confused; by "the usual grace period" do you mean the Core Library Committee's three release policy?

I did mean that one, yes. That was my question earlier - is Cabal along with *all* core libraries covered by the CLC's 3-release policy? The *Core Libraries* Committee (CLC) defines a "core library" as "Our definition of "core library" is a library that ships with GHC." (See https://wiki.haskell.org/Library_submissions#The_Libraries) But indeed, Cabal is not part of the CLC libraries list on that page. So I'm confused too: a) is Cabal a "core library", b) does that mean Cabal is bound by the 3-release policy?

GHC has never, as far as I am aware, considered major version bumps of its dependencies to be part of its interface. We perform a major bump of most libraries with nearly every release [1].

Yes, and major version bumps are not necessarily BC.