Dependencies/backwards compatibility in Hackage

Björn Bringert bringert at cs.chalmers.se
Thu Feb 1 10:49:26 EST 2007


Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:
> Björn Bringert <bringert at cs.chalmers.se>, 2007-02-01 15.36 +0100:
>> Ross Paterson wrote:
>> I think that the correct solution to this problem would be to make a new 
>> release of haxr (which used to be XmlRpc) that works with HaXml 1.17.
> 
> But then what is your answer to the problem of things breaking in the
> time between the release of HaXml 1.17 and making a new release of haxr?
> 
> -Sven

I don't really have one, expect fast development :-).

One possibility would be to have a convention about version number 
changes when libraries make backwards-incompatible API changes. E.g. 
HaXml should change major version whenever a change would break 
something that depends on it. Then all libraries which depend on HaXml 
could specify:

Build-depends: HaXml >= 1.13 && < 2

or something like that. The only problem would be that it would be 
overly restrictive if a HaXml 2.0 comes out that the current version of 
the depending library actually works with.

/Björn


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