[Haskell-cafe] cabal specify a "tested version", ghci target?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sat, 2006-08-12 at 03:52 +0200, Marc Weber wrote:
> 1.)
> 	I know I can use
> 		Build-Depends:   lib == <version>, lib2 < version, lib3 >= version
> 	and so on.
> 
> 	Do you think it would be useful to introducue some notation to indicate
> 	a "tested with" ?
> 
> 	Reason, purpose: I think its sometimes the case that a author/ mantainer
> 	is quite busy with other projects and misses that some dependencies
> 	break things.. If you want to try out you're left with some compiler
> 	errors and a dependency and have to try out which version works.
> 
> 	I would propose using this syntax:
> 		lib-1.3 >=1.1 
> 	to indicate that lib 1.1 is required at leeast and tested with up to
> 	1.3.. Cabal might then give a warning if you try to use 1.4 or greater
> 	"using newer version than tested" or similar..
> 
> 	What do you think?
> 	Would this be useful?

Well there is actually already a "tested-with:" field that you can put
in a .cabal file, however at the moment it refers only to the Haskell
implementation, eg ghc-x.y, hugs-x.y etc not to versions of libraries.

Yes, I think it's a quite reasonable argument to extend this to include
exact versions of libraries that it has been tested with.

What do others think?

Duncan