[Haskell-cafe] Averting QuickCheck Madness

[Christopher Lane Hinson]

There are some libraries that depend on QuickCheck 2, and others that 
depend on QuickCheck 1.  This can be a problem.  AIUI, the Haskell 
Platform current depends on QC1, but intends to move to QC2 soon.  I also 
know that the cabal mailing list has talked about some kind of 
private-depends capability to mitigate this kind of thing in the future.

However, I don't see how it can possibly be a best practice to depend on 
QuickCheck from a shipping library.  End users never use this, 
and for users of upstream packages who may compile from source and 
contribute the occasional (but valuable!) patch, this is nothing but a 
compile-time problem waiting to happen.

(Note that a user who contributes to a library should be encouraged to run 
test suites, but I'm talking about users of upstream packages.)

There are some good ideas discussed on this list last year*, but none of 
them seem to have been blessed by the community.

* http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-September/047216.html

Friendly,
--Lane