Package versioning confusion

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

sven.panne:
> I'm currently trying to unify the darcs-all scripts for GHC/Hugs/nhc, adding 
> a "--release" option on the way, which is inteded to retrieve fixed versions 
> from Hackage instead of the latest & greatest stuff from darcs repos. Looking 
> at nhc's package list, I found a few issues:
> 
>  * Iavor's package is called "monadLib", but the darcs repo on 
> darcs.haskell.org is called "monad". I propose to simply rename that 
> directory to match "monadLib". There is already an empty directory of the 
> same name there, so somebody else was obviously confused, too. If nobody 
> yells soon, I'll do this renaming.
> 
>  * Malcolm: Could you move the polyparse repository from 
> http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/fp/darcs/polyparse to darcs.haskell.org/packages, 
> please? This would make things more consistent.
> 
>  * Finally, I am utterly confused by the fps package: There is a version 0.7 
> on Hackage, the repo at http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps seems to 
> contain a 0.8 version, and we finally have a version somehow integrated into 
> the base package, all with different APIs/#ifdefs/etc. Help!!! Which version 

Version 0.7 is the last stable release. It should be compile with GHC
6.4.2 and earlier. The version in base corresponds to this version, with
one or two safety tweaks (unfortunately).

Version 0.8 is the unreleased darcs version, to be merged into base, in
a week or two (after we replace the array fusion system).

> compiles with which Haskell implementation? Which is the most current 
> version? Will we split this from base? I know that there have been epic 
> discussions on the libraries list, but after >20 mails I was somehow lost. If 
> we want to keep this in base for some time, it should at least be assured 

As far as I know it has not yet been decided to split it out.

We'll be tagging and released fps 0.8 (only for ghc 6.4.2 and earlier),
and the same code wil appear in base, in a couple of weeks, hopefully.

> that it compiles with all Haskell implementations, so we could nuke the 
> explicit "fps" package from nhc's package list. It can be re-added later, but 
> please in synch with the rest of the implementations. Using it currently must 
> be a nightmare for packagers/users due to this versionitis... :-/

The other compilers should be using a base package with fps in it, as
hugs and ghc do. 

fps as a package only exists  as a seperate darcs repo for those systems
that don't have bytestrings in base. I.e. older GHC's, and nhc98 (not
Hugs or GHC 6.6).

Does that help clear things up? Effectively there is *no* fps package
really -- its suppposed to be part of base, as ghc and hugs have it.

-- Don