igloo:
On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 05:19:31PM +0200, Udo Stenzel wrote:
Ian Lynagh wrote:
People interested in making it easy to use new versions of packages with old compiler releases can make a small script that installs empty Cabal packages called bytestring, containers, array, etc.
That completely misses the fact that bytestring cannot be upgraded, no matter how many fake packages are available.
Ah, you mean the problem is that it really does depend on some change in bytestring (the internal API?), rather than just having a dependency on the bytestring package?
Then yes, things are not so easy. Part of the motivation for splitting up base is so that this sort of thing is easier in the future.
Yes, this was exactly the motivation for not back porting the binary library to 6.4 and earlier: it depends on representation details of ByteString that I'm not going to cpp into portability. If I understand correctly, the main issue for Udo is simply that the MonadFix instance is required by his code, and isn't available in binary 0.3 -- the version to be used on earlier GHCs. Is that right Udo? If that's the case, manually inserting that instance when using binary 0.3 seems easy enough. -- Don