[Haskell-cafe] Problem with package consistency on Hackage

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2008-10-10 at 08:31 -0500, Antoine Latter wrote:
> Folks,
> 
> I'm not sure who to email about this, but hopefully someone on the cafe knows:
> 
> On the machine which builds the Hackage packages the 'binary' package
> is built against 'bytestring-0.9.1.2', however the package I just
> uploaded gets built against 'bytestring-0.9.1.3' which leades to
> typecheck failures (the ByteStrings I get from the 'binary' package
> are not the same as all the other ByteStrings).  See:
> 
> http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/uuid/1.0.0/logs/failure/ghc-6.8
> 
> If I wait will Hackage eventually become consistent?  How does this work?

It's not a problem for users who use cabal-install because it has a dep
planner specifically designed to avoid this problem. The current
automated builds on hackage are not nearly so clever and thus hit this
problem regularly.

The solution in future will be not to do builds on hackage at all but
let users and automated build clients upload results of build outcomes.
That way they can use tools like cabal-install to generate consistent
install plans.

Duncan