OK, let me clarify the modern situation right now: - Libraries which need to have their bounds bumped are now hpc, hoopl, haskeline, terminfo, Cabal (the new ones are due to the filepath bump) - An alternative to the transformers issue is to simply remove transformers as a bootstrap package. This is what my current ghc-7.8 branch does. Cheers, Edward Excerpts from Yitzchak Gale's message of 2015-03-18 08:10:36 -0700:
Moving here from Reddit, as suggested by Herbert. This a continuation of a thread that started with Edward Yang's post here:
http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2014-October/025389....
continued here, a few months later:
http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2014-December/025529...
and ended here, in the following month:
http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/glasgow-haskell-users/2015-January/025551....
Herbert Valerio Riedel wrote on Reddit (http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2zc2jg/ghc_7101_rc3_is_out_test_it_...)
I think I remember what the problem was with your patch (and why it wasn't picked up rightaway): you needed tweaks to boot packages such as transformers would cause the GHC source-tarball to diverge from the officially released upstream packages. One solution would be to rather provide an out-of-tree patch a user can apply manually, rather than making an official GHC 7.8.5 release with unofficial modifications to upstream packages (which would also require some administration overhead on the Git level as upstream packages are automatically mirrored Git submodules).
I think Edward's last post (in January, linked above) addressed those concerns. In summary: release upstream point releases for hpc and hoopl that only bump the dependencies of base and time, and provide instance Applicative IO in the GHC sources for 7.8.5 so that no change is needed for transformers.
Will that work? Can we go with this?
Thanks, Yitz