Advance notice that I'd like to make Cabal depend on parsec

[Roman Cheplyaka]

* Ivan Lazar Miljenovic <ivan.miljenovic at gmail.com> [2013-03-15 22:12:47+1100]
> On 15 March 2013 22:05, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:
> > * Heinrich Apfelmus <apfelmus at quantentunnel.de> [2013-03-15 10:38:37+0100]
> >> Duncan Coutts wrote:
> >> >Hi folks,
> >> >
> >> >I want to give you advance notice that I would like to make Cabal depend
> >> >on parsec. The implication is that GHC would therefore depend on parsec
> >> >and thus it would become a core package, rather than just a HP package.
> >> >So this would affect both GHC and the HP, though I hope not too much.
> >> >
> >> >[..]
> >> >
> >> >Why did I choose parsec? Practicality dictates that I can only use
> >> >things in the core libraries, and the nearest thing we have to that is
> >> >the parser lib that is in the HP. I tried to use happy but I could not
> >> >construct a grammar/lexer combo to handle the layout (also, happy is not
> >> >exactly known for its great error messages).
> >>
> >> Reuse is good, but the implication I'm worried about is this: Can I
> >> upgrade the  parsec  package installed on my system by doing a user
> >> install from  hackage ? Without an implementation of more flexible
> >> package installations (multiple versions installed simultaneously),
> >> any dependency of GHC has its version number essentially set into
> >> stone.
> >
> > We've had that working for a long time. Right now I even have multiple
> > installed versions of Cabal-the-library itself.
> >
> > It's not that Parsec would be automatically linked into each executable.
> > It's just that ghc-the-program would have Parsec linked into it.
> 
> And ghc-the-library, which means that anything that uses
> ghc-as-a-library (and indeed even Cabal-as-a-library) no longer has a
> choice of which version of parsec they use.

Right. But in this regard, GHC API and Cabal are no different from any
other libraries that suffer from the same issue. (Except that it's hard
to recompile GHC to use an alternative Parsec version.) And these are
not exactly the most popular libraries either — so I doubt this change
will have a large impact.

Roman