Dear Caféistas I desperately need your collective knowledge I have been working on porting the haskell-platform to the FreeBSD operating system for a while now and some versioning issues have come up. FreeBSD is still running on GHC-6.10.4 (6.12 is in the works). The ghc package contains a couple of libraries that ghc is built against and requires to run. For instance, network-2.2.1.2 is one of them. The problem is that the Haskell Platform requires version 2.2.1.4. Under normal circumstances we would port network-2.2.1.4 to FreeBSD and then specify it as a dependency of the Platform port. But then we end up with two (exposed) versions of network installed on the system. For example, let's assume that I have the following Haskell source (Networking.hs): module Networking where import Data.ByteString.Lazy import Data.Maybe import Network.HTTP import Network.Stream import Network.URI getBinary :: String -> IO ByteString getBinary url = do uri <- return $ fromJust $ parseURI url rsp <- simpleHTTP $ request uri getResponseBody rsp where request uri = Request { rqURI = uri , rqMethod = GET , rqHeaders = [] , rqBody = empty } When I try to compile it (`ghc --make Networking.hs`) I get the following: Networking.hs:12:30: Couldn't match expected type `network-2.2.1.2:Network.URI.URI' against inferred type `URI' In the first argument of `request', namely `uri' In the second argument of `($)', namely `request uri' In a stmt of a 'do' expression: rsp <- simpleHTTP $ request uri However, the following thing could help: $ ghc --make Networking.hs -package network-2.2.1.2 The workaround ain't acceptable to the FreeBSD committers, so I have to come up with something better... In a perfect world, I'd be able to install the required HP dependencies without tripping ghc up. Then we could switch over to the platform as a foundation of GHC-6.12. I have lots of questions. Is it smart to have multiple installed versions of the same library? Up until now, we could avoid such situations. What would be the correct approach to updating network? I guess it would involve rebuilding all installed packages that had previously been compiled with ghc? Though I hope not - our package management system could pull that off if necessary. If it is perhaps a bad idea to update certain "core" libraries, is there a way to declare them as such in the cabal file? regards and TIA, dave