> 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.