[Haskell-cafe] Cabal message problem.

[Henning Thielemann]

On 16.12.2010 15:40, Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On 16 December 2010 13:38, Daniel Fischer
> <daniel.is.fischer at googlemail.com>  wrote:
>
>> 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?
>
> That suggestion has come up quite a few times. I think it's probably a
> good idea.

But then Cabal-Install should report for which packages it had to 
extended version ranges and then it should prepare a set of e-mails to 
the maintainers with according patches to their Cabal files. :-)

Maybe whenever a new GHC is released or a new set of Platform libraries, 
a script at Hackage should compile packages and send reports to the 
maintainers, either with suggestions which version dependency to relax, 
or with the compiler log, if the package could not be built.

On the other hand, as maintainer of a lot of packages, I wished 
extending dependency ranges would be simpler. I often do not jump to 
every new GHC release, since this means recompiling all my packages and 
I may end up with touching a new bug in GHC, and then turning back to 
the old compiler version is difficult. Thus people often have to e-mail 
me, before I notice the need for a change myself. Then I extend the 
version range, bump the last digit in the version of my affected 
package, create a new darcs patch, upload to hackage, push a patch to 
darcs repository. Sure, I have a script for these steps, but consider 
this procedure for thirty packages for every GHC release!