Hi Henning Thanks. I'm open to suggests for prettifying the output, or adding further comparisons. While coding precis, I decided that trying to police version numbers would be impractical so I decided to focus on changes/diffs instead. By the way - on the Package version policy page, Section 2 (Version Numbers) takes a lot of reading to make sense of (and I'm notionally a native English speaker). Maybe item 3 should state that "D" increases rather than the nebulus "other version components". http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy Best wishes Stephen

On 5 May 2010 12:14, Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Wed, 5 May 2010, Stephen Tetley wrote:

...

I'm open to suggests for prettifying the output, or adding further comparisons. While coding precis, I decided that trying to police version numbers would be impractical so I decided to focus on changes/diffs instead.

Sure, but it helps to get an approximation of the necessary version bumps, right?

Hi Henning I've uploaded a new release to Hackage. The new version will generate a HTML report when supplied with an --out= command line flag and print a manageable summary to the console. Here's the console summary between 0.3.1 and 0.4.0 (unfortunately I can't host the HTML output publicly). $ precis --out=precis.html precis-0.4.0/precis.cabal precis-0.3.1/precis.cabal Comparing precis 0.4.0 to precis 0.3.1... 2 exposed modules removed 21 export list items removed 1 datatype removed 13 type signatures removed Generating a HTML report seems obvious in retrospect, as the previous version was producing far too much information to be useful. The reporting in this version could do with some more work improve its clarity, but I hope 0.4.0 is now a useful tool, rather than a curio (which 0.3.1 was). Best wishes Stephen

On 13 May 2010 14:24, Bas van Dijk wrote:

Hi Stephen,

precis reports parse errors when applied to packages containing Unicode syntax.

Regards,

Bas

Hi Bas I'm not entirely surprised... Do you know if haskell-src-exts can parse files with Unicode syntax (and I'm not using enough extensions)? Thanks Stephen

Hi Roel Thanks for the information. With Precis, I wanted to make a standalone tool rather than work with GHC-API. I don't know how stable GHC-API, but I expect it to be less stable than haskell-src-exts, and as Precis is a tool to help gauge the stability of packages I want it to be stable itself. Certainly, I don't want to be committed to getting it to work with each GHC revision. The downside to this that Precis will always lack some of the power that it could get from GHC-API. Modules with inline FFI code won't parse, and evidently Unicode symbols don't parse either. Also, even after a successful parse, the analysis that Precis does is quite shallow, diffs are calculated by pretty printing the AST of the relevant constructions (module export lists, type signatures of functions/constants..., class instances, data and class declarations). Because the analysis is shallow - quite a few false positives are generated. Changing say a type alias will indicate a change, e.g. the code below will indicate a change but the change shouldn't merit a major version number change: doesFileExist :: FilePath -> IO Bool doesFileExist :: String -> IO Bool This is the reason I stop short of considering Precis a Package Version Policy checker and only report numbers of apparent changes not a conclusion drawn from them, as I think Henning suggested. From the work done to get Precis where it is, I'd wager trying to build a fully automatic PVP checker would be more effort that its usefulness would merit. Best wishes Stephen