Specifying one exact version is too restrictive, you'll end up with everybody having umpteen versions of almost all packages installed.
I don't see this as a problem. Disk space is extremely cheap, but our time is precious. Aplications on Mac OS X provide necessary libraries in their .app folder. That's some waste but it relieves you from dependency hell.
Minor version bumps which leave the API unchanged shouldn't break anything, small additions to the API should rarely break things, so if people adhere to http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy ,
Indeed. Neil, in this case i think, tagsoup's version shouldn't have changed from 0.6 to minor 0.8 while exported definitions such as "optLookupEntity" were removed. What do you think? I'd be glad if we could find a general solution. Currently everybody using ghc 6.10.4 and trying to install hxt will go through this hassle. Which would be almost everybody.