[Hackage] #220: detect inconsistent package dependencies

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-01-27 at 17:44 -0500, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> hmm, couldn't figure out a way to login to reply.

It says on the front page :-)

username "guest" and password "haskell'" (note the apostrophe at the
end)

> Hackage wrote:
> >  Replying to [ticket:220 duncan]:
> >  > The longer term solution is to allow installing multiple instances of
> >  the same versions of a package built against different versions of its
> >  dependencies. This is the functional Nix approach however it would
> >  probably also require support from ghc.
> > 
> >  Couldn't this lead to an exponential explosion in the number of package
> >  instances?
> 
> only if you *actually* install all possible combinations, which seems 
> unlikely.  If you're worried about all the old cruft hanging around 
> taking up space, maybe looking at Nix's garbage collection and other 
> features would be good sharing of experience.

Right, Nix uses GC to clean up old combinations that are not used any
more. Of course Nix is a proper package manger so it knows all code that
uses a package where as we do not.

Duncan