Re: [Haskell-cafe] Platform Versioning Policy: upper bounds are not our friends

On 16 August 2012 08:55, Brandon Allbery wrote:

On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Carter Schonwald wrote:

...

no one is disputing that there are conditional changes in dependencies depending on library versions.

Indeed. But the ghc release that split up base broke cabalised packages with no warning to users until they failed to compile. Upper bounds were put in place to avoid that kind of breakage in the future.

There's also the case where people blindly put something like "base < 10" in the .cabal file, and then it broke on the next GHC release. This happend with ghc-core-0.5: it completely failed to build with base-4 (and because cabal-install kept defaulting packages to use base-3 I think a lot of people missed cases like this and blindly thought it worked). I like having upper bounds on version numbers... right up until people abuse them. -- Ivan Lazar Miljenovic Ivan.Miljenovic@gmail.com http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com