[Haskell-cafe] Cabal message problem.

[Daniel Fischer]

On Thursday 16 December 2010 11:08:23, Johannes Waldmann wrote:
> But: I'm always puzzled by build-dependencies like "A <= 3.4.5".
> With the "major.minor.release" scheme,
> a change in "release" means no API change (just bugfix),
> in "minor" means compatible extension of API,
> and only "major" changes can break the API.
> So, I could understand "A = 3.*" but anything that mentions

But according to 
http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy the major 
version is A.B and C is the minor version, so "A < 3.5" is a reasonable 
constraint if the package is known to work with A-3.4.x but hasn't been 
tested with A >= 3.5.

The problem is that without upper bounds, things will break a lot when 
packages undergo API changes, but probably more often things will also work 
with the new API. So with upper bounds, you prevent breakage at the cost of 
preventing builds which would work.

Maybe a flag "ignore upper bounds and try with the latest" for cabal would 
be a solution. Would that be hard to implement or easy?

> minor and release numbers is really a quite pessimistic view of the
> world. Actually, I read "A <= 3.4.5" as "my package depends on a bug
> in package A that was fixed in 3.4.6"

Or: it breaks with a bug introduced in 3.4.6 which hasn't yet been fixed.

>
> J.W.