[Haskell-cafe] Why are new releases of libraries required for every GHC release?

[Magnus Therning]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 10:39:06 +0000, Duncan Coutts wrote:
>On Wed, 2006-11-22 at 09:12 +0000, DavidA wrote:
>> Some recent comments suggested that every time there is a new GHC release, 
>> there needs to be a new wxHaskell release (or insert name of other library 
>> here) to work with it. This seems to be true even for minor upgrades, like 
>> 6.4.1 -> 6.4.2.
>
>These GUI libs tend only to break on major releases like 6.2 -> 6.4 and
>6.4 -> 6.6. In both cases this was due to changes in the way packages
>are managed. Since these GUI libs are both pretty large and made of
>several packages they were affected. Many simpler projects were fine
>with the transition.
>
>> Why is this? Does GHC break binary compatibility at every release? Is this 
>> avoidable?
>
>Yes this is what you're thinking about with minor upgrades like 6.4.1 ->
>6.4.2, so any binary packages, eg windows installers need to be rebuilt
>from source to work with the new ghc version.
>
>> This makes using Haskell unnecessarily hard compared to other platforms. 
>
>Well, usually it's only a rebuild so as long as your build system is
>ok, it's not too hard.

Does this affect any apps at all?

On Debian at least, ghc links in all haskell code statically which means
that no re-compiles are necessary for binaries.  How's this on other
platforms?

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                             (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4)
magnus at therning.org             Jabber: magnus.therning at gmail.com
http://therning.org/magnus

Software is not manufactured, it is something you write and publish.
Keep Europe free from software patents, we do not want censorship
by patent law on written works.

As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not
certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality.
     -- Albert Einstein
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20061122/f337d531/attachment.bin