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

Magnus Therning magnus at therning.org
Wed Nov 22 08:20:38 EST 2006


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)
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