On 18/01/2015 15:49, Edward Kmett wrote:
The alternative is just that cabal will continue indefinitely to try to install completely broken combinations, and more people will be driven to a fixed package set like stackage LTS. That strikes me as probably-a-good-thing. Most of these problems are caused by people being too optimistic about upper bounds and when they realize their mistake and upload a new version, they'll often leave the old versions with the lying bounds intact, which causes cabal to pick old versions without bug fixes, and then give strange build errors.
To my knowledge, the few cases where Herbert has actively done a patch to the .cabal file like this without author communication is because the package is in very very widespread use and the author has been incommunicado for many months. As I recall, Max Bolingbroke has a some packages that fit this bill. A simple counter example, that I noticed after the fact [1] If you have an example of a package you've written that he's patched that you'd rather he left alone, I'm sure he'd be happy to oblige. I am, however, as of yet unaware of any such overreach and I'm rather disinclined to view the enormous amount of effort Herbert has poured into keeping the ecosystem working smoothly as anything but a good thing. The price of doing nothing here is quite high. I strongly object to the current mechanism of silent updates (for the downloader), and I would much rather have all my packages left alone until this changes at the very least (if ever). The maintenance overriding is another sad point (which might be warranted in some case, although haskell already have a procedure in place for that), but in any case not as critical as the first point.
[1] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/hourglass -- Vincent