On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Paolo Giarrusso <p.giarrusso@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi all,

IIUC, people used to spend nontrivial effort making their Haskell tools work across a range of dependencies, and be careful about dropping support for older ones.

Given the tools we had, this was not easy. I was never aware of any tool that substantially helped with making sure that a package remained compatible with the range of packages that was theoretically allowed by the package's .cabal file.

Do cabal sandboxes or Stack reduce that need, at least for applications?* Or conversely, how bad is it to restrict support to users having them? I guess I am asking about common policies, but this probably depends on adoption of those tools.

IMO there is really no one right answer to this question. It depends on how nice you are, or whether someone is paying you. Obviously if someone is paying you, do as she says or do what she needs. If no one is paying you, then how nice do you want to be by expending the work? Honestly I'm not very nice. I keep stuff working in the current Stackage Nightly but that's it. Maintaining compatibility with huge dependency matrices is just an enormous amount of work. In my view, someone installing an application can just use stack and Stackage.