On Sat, 2007-09-01 at 14:39 +0100, Claus Reinke wrote:
[subject taken from cvs-libraries@; discussion directed to libraries@]
does anyone else feel that there is something wrong in haskell library land? i'm picking on cabal here as one of "the usual suspects", but it seems to have become the rule that otherwise stable code has to be fixed every so often, to accomodate new compiler versions, new library dependency versions, new cabal versions, new xyz versions,..
it is almost as if everything feels free these days to evolve in non- backwards-compatible ways, following the motto "what do i care for my apis of yesterday?".
with the ongoing trend towards separately evolving libraries rather than prepackaged kitchen-sink releases, this means that useful libraries die quickly, and have to be revived continuously, or they will be left behind. one symptom is "get the latest from hackage" replacing useful extra libraries kept in sync with each other (never mind that the hackage versions are no more likely to work without fixes than the in-repository versions).
it is often small things ("that function/option has been renamed", "you now need to import x instead of y", "you can work around this by using 2 cabal files, then removing one depending on context", etc.), but as all dependencies keep eroding in this way, haskell projects are now built on sand rather than firm foundations, requiring constant attention just to avoid falling behind - attention that would better be focussed on development than maintenance.
just a thought, claus
ps. perhaps i've misunderstood, and there is in fact a haskell cabal trying to introduce as many version incompatibilities as possible, to ensure a market demand for cabal.. ?-)
I agree that Cabal is really unstable ATM. The problem is that we added new features, but are still missing lots of features and are facing yet unsolved problems. Also, the Cabal code needs quite some cleanup which we do while adding new features. The problem is, that this brakes many Setup.lhs files, also in base libraries. But this should only affect ghc HEAD, nothing else. This is the development version, so you can't really expect it to be stable at all. So, could you please exclude Cabal (and stay with me when I say we hope to have things stable by the next ghc release), re-evaluate the situation excluding anything related to Cabal issues (ie, setup.lhs errors), and see if your issue still exists? Thanks, / Thomas