I think using the runTests hook and the test flag make sense, described at http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047223.html. I released some libraries in this way, AFAIK it works well. On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 4:57 PM, Christopher Lane Hinson wrote:

There are some libraries that depend on QuickCheck 2, and others that depend on QuickCheck 1.  This can be a problem.  AIUI, the Haskell Platform current depends on QC1, but intends to move to QC2 soon.  I also know that the cabal mailing list has talked about some kind of private-depends capability to mitigate this kind of thing in the future.

However, I don't see how it can possibly be a best practice to depend on QuickCheck from a shipping library.  End users never use this, and for users of upstream packages who may compile from source and contribute the occasional (but valuable!) patch, this is nothing but a compile-time problem waiting to happen.

(Note that a user who contributes to a library should be encouraged to run test suites, but I'm talking about users of upstream packages.)

There are some good ideas discussed on this list last year*, but none of them seem to have been blessed by the community.

* http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047216.html

Friendly, --Lane _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe