In message <1190644931.18359.22.camel@intothevoid> Thomas Schilling
On Sun, 2007-09-23 at 18:02 -0700, Don Stewart wrote:
Neil Davies wrote:
Given that GHC 6.8 is just around the corner and, given how it has re-organised the libraries so that the dependencies in many (most/all) the packages in the hackage DB are now not correct.
Is there a plan of how to get hackage DB up to speed with GHC 6.8 ?
Ian, GHC HQ, can you elaborate on what the plan is on fixing the hackage libraries for ghc 6.8 -- should everyone be springing into action to update .cabal files and fix api changes?
The problem is that Cabal-1.2 is not backwards compatible wrt. the API for Setup.[l]hs. In most cases this can be fixed by using a trivial Setup.hs and use configurations instead, in which case you'll again depend on Cabal-1.2.
Of course Cabal-1.2 works perfectly well with all versions of GHC (6.2 and later) so this is ok. For example, people using GHC-6.6.x can add Cabal-1.2 (keeping their previous version of Cabal library as well). So it's perfectly possible to make a package support many versions of GHC (and other Haskell impls), what is harder is making it support many versions of Cabal. In summary: supporting both GHC-6.6 and 6.8 "out of the box" is hard (unless your package is really very simple). Supporting GHC-6.6 + Cabal-1.2 and GHC-6.8 "out of the box" is easy. Duncan