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

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-07-19 at 10:06 +0100, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> | 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.

Yes, I've always been confused by that. You go to some effort to not
change the binary format of .hi files or change the ABI of the RTS etc
and yet ghc explicitly checks that the .hi files are exactly the same
version preventing any mixing anyway:

Foo.hs:
module Foo where
foo = 3

Bar.hs
module Bar where
import Foo
bar = foo + foo

$ ghc-6.6 -c Foo.hs
$ ghc-6.6.1 -c Bar.hs

Bar.hs:3:0:
    Bad interface file: Foo.hi
        mismatched interface file versions: expected 6061, found 6060

So yes, that's why the Gtk2Hs 0.9.11 Windows installer checks for
exactly ghc-6.6 and not 6.6.x in general.

Duncan