Why upper bound version numbers?

Howard B. Golden howard_b_golden at yahoo.com
Thu Jun 9 19:12:24 UTC 2016


On June 9, 2016 10:43:00 -0700 David Fox wrote:

​> It seems to me that if you have any thought at all for your library's
> clients the chances of this happening are pretty insignificant.

Sadly (IMO), this happens all too frequently. Upward compatibility suffers because most package authors are (naturally) interested in solving their own problems, and they don't get paid to think about others using their package who might be affected by an upward-incompatible change. This is a hard problem to solve unless we can find a way to pay package authors to take the extra time and effort to satisfy their users. Most open source communities are stricter about requiring upward compatibility than the Haskell community is.


Howard

________________________________
From: David Fox <dsf at seereason.com>
To: Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel at gmail.com> 
Cc: "ghc-devs at haskell.org" <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
Sent: Thursday, June 9, 2016 10:43 AM
Subject: Re: Why upper bound version numbers?





On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 11:15 PM, Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel at gmail.com> wrote:

or even worse silent failures where the code behaves
>subtly wrong or different than expected. Testsuites mitigate this to
>some degree, but they too are an imperfect solution to this hard
>problem.
>

​It seems to me that if you have any thought at all for your library's clients the chances of this happening are pretty insignificant.

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