Fixing "breaking packages"

[Ian Lynagh]

On Fri, Mar 01, 2013 at 10:33:39AM -0800, Johan Tibell wrote:
> 
> It's the only model I believe scales to e.g. executables that depend on
> thousands of packages

Debian has approximately 30,000 packages (although admittedly I don't
know how many are libraries), and only needs a single version of each
package.

Having a single version of each package (with Hackage using a system
similar to Debian's releases and 'testing' to define the sets of package
versions) would make life a lot easier:

Library maintainers don't need to worry so much about keeping packages
working with old versions of their dependencies.

Authors know that they can use any 2 packages together, and not have to
worry about one of those packages depending on foo 1.* and the other
depending on foo 2.*.

The intractible problem of testing all combinations of versions of
dependencies, to ensure that packages really do build in all the
circumstances that they claim they do, disappears.


Thanks
Ian