Why upper bound version numbers?

[Erik Hesselink]

What do you expect will be the distribution of 'soft' and 'hard' upper
bounds? In my experience, all upper bounds currently are 'soft' upper
bounds. They might become 'hard' upper bounds for a short while after
e.g. a GHC release, but in general, if a package maintainer knows that
a package fails to work with a certain version of a dependency, they
fix it.

So it seems to me that this is not so much a choice between 'soft' and
'hard' upper bounds, but a choice on what to do when you can't resolve
dependencies in the presence of the current (upper) bounds. Currently,
as you say, we give pretty bad error messages. The alternative you
propose (just try) currently often gives the same result in my
experience: bad error messages, in this case not from the solver, but
unintelligible compiler errors in an unknown package. So it seems the
solution might just be one of messaging: make the initial resolver
error much friendlier, and give a suggestion to use e.g.
--allow-newer=foo. The opposite might also be interesting to explore:
if installing a dependency (so not something you're developing or
explicitly asking for) fails to install and doesn't have an upper
bound, suggest something like --constaint=foo<x.y.

Do you have different experiences regarding the number of 'hard' upper
bounds that exist?

Regards,

Erik

On 8 June 2016 at 22:01, Michael Sloan <mgsloan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right, part of the issue with having dependency solving at the core of your
> workflow is that you never really know who's to blame.  When running into
> this circumstance, either:
>
> 1) Some maintainer made a mistake.
> 2) Some maintainer did not have perfect knowledge of the future and has not
> yet updated some upper bounds.  Or, upper bounds didn't get retroactively
> bumped (usual).
> 3) You're asking cabal to do something that can't be done.
> 4) There's a bug in the solver.
>
> So the only thing to do is to say "something went wrong".  In a way it is
> similar to type inference, it is difficult to give specific, concrete error
> messages without making some arbitrary choices about which constraints have
> gotten pushed around.
>
> I think upper bounds could potentially be made viable by having both hard
> and soft constraints.  Until then, people are putting 2 meanings into one
> thing.  By having the distinction, I think cabal-install could provide much
> better errors than it does currently.  This has come up before, I'm not sure
> what came of those discussions.  My thoughts on how this would work:
>
> * The dependency solver would prioritize hard constraints, and tell you
> which soft constraints need to be lifted.  I believe the solver even already
> has this.  Stack's integration with the solver will actually first try to
> get a plan that doesn't override any snapshot versions, by specifying them
> as hard constraints.  If that doesn't work, it tries again with soft
> constraints.
>
> * "--allow-soft" or something would ignore soft constraints.  Ideally this
> would be selective on a per package / upper vs lower.
>
> * It may be worth having the default be "--allow-soft" + be noisy about
> which constraints got ignored.  Then, you could have a "--pedantic-bounds"
> flag that forces following soft bounds.
>
> I could get behind upper bounds if they allowed maintainers to actually
> communicate their intention, and if we had good automation for their
> maintenance.  As is, putting upper bounds on everything seems to cause more
> problems than it solves.
>
> -Michael
>
> On Wed, Jun 8, 2016 at 1:31 AM, Ben Lippmeier <benl at ouroborus.net> wrote:
>>
>>
>> On 8 Jun 2016, at 6:19 pm, Reid Barton <rwbarton at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>  Suppose you maintain a library that is used by a lot of first year uni
>>> students (like gloss). Suppose the next GHC version comes around and your
>>> library hasn’t been updated yet because you’re waiting on some dependencies
>>> to get fixed before you can release your own. Do you want your students to
>>> get a “cannot install on this version” error, or some confusing build error
>>> which they don’t understand?
>>
>>
>> This is a popular but ultimately silly argument. First, cabal dependency
>> solver error messages are terrible; there's no way a new user would figure
>> out from a bunch of solver output about things like "base-4.7.0.2" and
>> "Dependency tree exhaustively searched" that the solution is to build with
>> an older version of GHC.
>>
>>
>> :-) At least “Dependency tree exhaustively searched” sounds like it’s not
>> the maintainer’s problem. I prefer the complaints to say “can you please
>> bump the bounds on this package” rather than “your package is broken”.
>>
>> Ben.
>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> ghc-devs mailing list
>> ghc-devs at haskell.org
>> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> ghc-devs mailing list
> ghc-devs at haskell.org
> http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>