On Sun, 2009-02-01 at 15:56 +0100, Niklas Broberg wrote:
So in the next cabal-install release (which should be pretty soon now) configure will do the same thing and pick base 3 unless you specify build-depends base >= 4.
... and so there will never be any incentive for these many packages to migrate to base-4, which also has consequences for packages that do want to use base-4, but also want to depend on such packages. And so base-3 will live on in eternity, and there was never any point in doing that new base release at all.
I really really think this is the wrong way to go. Occasional destruction is desperately needed for progress, else things will invariably stagnate.
I disagree. Having everything fail (we measured it as ~90% of hackage) when people upgraded to ghc-6.10 would have been a disaster. Do you recall the screaming, wailing and gnashing of teeth after the release of ghc-6.8 when most of hackage broke? We (I mean ghc and cabal hackers) got a lot of flak for not making the upgrade process easier and needlessly breaking everyone's perfectly good packages. This time round we went to a lot of effort to make the upgrade process smooth. And for the most part it was. Only a small proportion of hackage packages broke. Now I agree that there is a problem with new packages where the configure selects base 4 but install selects base 3. I've improved that in the darcs version. You're also right that during the lifespan of base 4 we need to encourage new releases to start working with it because we cannot stick with base 3 for ever. Doing that with warnings hints etc is the way to go. Destruction is not such a friendly approach. We do not need to make the users suffer, we just need to inform and persuade developers uploading new releases to do the right thing. Duncan