"Claus Reinke"
if this is the "official" interpretation of cabal package version numbers, could it please be made explicit in a prominent position in the cabal docs?
Me too. This is not a criticism nor endorsement of any particular scheme, just a vote in favor of having a - one, single, universal - scheme.
of course, i have absolutely no idea how to write stable packages under this interpretation. and the examples in the cabal docs do not explain this, either (neither "bar" nor "foo > 1.2" are any good under this interpretation).
You need a way to specify "foo > 1.2 && foo < 2", which is a suggestion that was tossed around here recently. Also, you'd need foo 1.x for x>=2 to be available after foo-2.0 arrives. 'base' aside, I don't think we want a system that requires us to rename a library any time incompatible changes are introduced. The major/minor scheme has worked nicely for .so for ages. I'd like to make the additional suggestion that a major version number of 0 means no compatibility guarantees.
Another reason not to change the name of 'base' is that there would be a significant cost to doing so: the name is everywhere, not just in the source code of GHC and its tools, but wiki pages, documentation, and so on.
Much like 'fps', now known as 'bytestring', no? I had some problems finding it, true, but the upside is that old stuff is free to reference fps until I can get around to test and update things.
how about using a provides/expects system instead of betting on version numbers? if a package X expects the functionality of base-1.0, cabal would go looking not for packages that happen to share the name, but for packages that provide the functionality. base-not-1.0 would know that it doesn't do that. and if there is no single package that reexports the functionality of base-1.0, cabal could even try to consult multiple packages to make ends meet
Scrap cabal in favor of 'ghc --make'? :-) Seriously though, how hard would it be to automatically generate a (suggested) build-depends from ghc --make? -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants