[Haskell-cafe] Re: circular dependencies in cabal

[Valentyn Kamyshenko]

Hi Duncan,

I agree with your arguments. I think it is a less evil to disable  
'cabal upgrade' until the problem is fixed.

To have 'cabal upgrade' to ask for confirmation (and to allow user to  
select packages to be updated from the list) is even better.

-- Valentyn.

On Feb 3, 2009, at 2:04 AM, Duncan Coutts wrote:

> On Mon, 2009-02-02 at 19:16 -0800, Valentyn Kamyshenko wrote:
>> Hi Duncan,
>>
>> The major problem that I see is with
>>  # cabal update
>>  # cabal upgrade
>> sequence of operations (that is, upgrading all installed packages).
>
> Right, that's exactly what doesn't work well and that I'm proposing to
> temporarily disable.
>
>> I use this regularly to keep packages that I use (or are going to  
>> use)
>> up to date.
>> This is the functionality that, I suppose, everybody expects from the
>> system like hackage/cabal.
>>
>> And, so far as I can see, the major problem is that 'cabal upgrade'
>> will happily upgrade packages, that the core package depends on, and
>> eventually will create configuration with circular dependencies.
>> Can we do something simple - like, for example, forbidding updates of
>> the packages that the core depends on (directly and indirectly)?
>
> Yes and there are a couple of additional ways we could improve it. But
> I'm thinking it'd be better to release before those things are done,  
> and
> so in the mean time disable upgrade. In the mean time we can make it
> list the available packages that are newer than the installed ones and
> you get to pick manually which ones are sensible to install.
>
> Duncan
>