[Haskell-cafe] Changing version numbering schemes for HackageDB packages?

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-02-10 at 10:21 -0800, Corey O'Connor wrote:
> I released a new version of data-spacepart that resolved some of the
> issues with the previous release. One issue I had was the previous
> release used the version numbering scheme I use at work:
> [date].[release] Which does not appear to work as well as the
> traditional X.Y.Z release numbering scheme with Cabal.

I'm not sure I understand. Is there something in Cabal or Hackage that
makes date-based numbering schemes not work well?

> As part of the new release I changed the version numbering scheme. An
> *obviously* bad idea if I thought it through. Any [date].[release]
> style version number is greater than a X.Y.Z version number until X
> gets rather large.
> 
> So what to do? Continue using the [date].[release] version numbering
> scheme? Or is there a way to coax HackageDB to ignore the old release?

Yeah, there's not a lot you can do except make the number higher. The
problem is not just hackage, it's all the previous releases in the wild.
All the tools assume the normal ordering on version numbers. Not just
the Cabal/Hackage tools but the native distro tools too.

People have suggested "epochs", but it turns out this doesn't make the
situation any better, as one can never get rid of having to specify the
epoch (eg 1:0.1.1).

Duncan