Dependencies/backwards compatibility in Hackage

[Ross Paterson]

On Thu, Feb 01, 2007 at 12:57:01PM +0100, Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:
> While trying out cabal-install today, I stumbled across the following:
> I wanted to install XmlRpc which depends on HaXml and works with
> HaXml-1.13.2. However, HaXml-1.17 which has also been uploaded to
> hackageDB changed an exposed module's name and XmlRpc doesn't work with
> it anymore.
> 
> I'm wondering how to avoid such situations. I appears to me that
> expecting the maintainer of every package depending on HaXml to update
> their dependencies "after the fact" doesn't make sense because it leaves
> an arbitrarily long window where the package won't build straight out
> of hackageDB.

We could decide on a standard interpretation of version numbers, e.g.
major.minor.patch.  To support this, we'd want wildcards like 1.13.*
in version ranges.

In the meantime, I'll remove HaXml-1.17 from HackageDB.