On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 10:05 AM, Carter Schonwald <carter.schonwald@gmail.com> wrote:

i have no clue, i'm just there dealing with the fallout of a confused new person who is convinced that cabal just doesn't work. and no fallout shelters in sight so I have to provide quick solutions that work™ to prevent frustration radiation poisoning.

why not just put all the modules in the same package? :)
I jest, BUT i have a real point in saying that.

why should i have to use a wrapper package which pins all the constraints?

That's a great question. It seems to be the question no one's able to answer, myself included. As I keep saying, Yesod went through years of PVP compliance, and users were constantly having build problems. It may have been the cabal-install dependency solver prior to 0.14, and now that problem is resolved. I'm not sure. I know that the new dependency solver used Yesod as a stress test case.

Releasing yesod-platform was pragmatic on two fronts:

1. It guaranteed a sane build plan when cabal (for whatever reason) couldn't determine one.

2. It prevents users from getting a completely untested set of packages, hopefully insulating them from some of the turbulence of Hackage.

I think you need to dial back your assumptions here. Your initial email made it sound like I'd broken the Yesod stack single-handedly a bunch of times recently. That worries me. If that actually happened, please explain how it happened. If users are getting build errors when they don't use yesod-platform, well, that's something we've known about in the Yesod community for a long time. The PVP didn't solve it, yesod-platform is a hack which fixes most of the end-user issue, and I'd love to get to a real solution.

Michael