[Haskell-cafe] gui libs? no thanks, i'm just browsing.. ;-)

[Claus Reinke]

>| You're right, that's annoying. It's particularly a problem for Windows
>| GHC users who expect pre-built binaries, since GHC currently requires
>| all libs to be rebuilt with each new minor GHC version.
>
>Are you sure?  We try hard not to change interface-file format or 
>calling conventions between minor releases, so you should not need 
>to recompile with minor releases.  Major ones are a different matter, 
>I grant you.

it may indeed "only" be major versions, but that is troublesome enough.
at one point, i had the then current 6.4.2, the upcoming 6.6, and head,
and then there are of course those "heads up" mails for head, suggesting
rebuilds of all libraries.. i was using wxhaskell instead of gtk2hs, but 
that had the same issues (even worse when there was no maintainer,
as ghc moved on, there were no lib binaries for new ghc versions, and
any existing lib binaries for old ghc versions were useless..).

abi compatibility would be very nice to have (if the library/binding code 
doesn't change, newer ghc major versions should still be able to link to 
bindings compiled with older ones). that is only going to become more
important as fewer libraries are going to be shipped with ghc itself now
(also with dynamically linked libraries).

is there even tool support for "i've got a new major version of ghc, please
rebuild and register everything i had registered for the old major version."?

claus