[Haskell-cafe] Platform Versioning Policy: upper bounds are not our friends

[Ivan Lazar Miljenovic]

On 16 August 2012 08:55, Brandon Allbery <allbery.b at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 6:46 PM, Carter Schonwald
> <carter.schonwald at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> no one is disputing that there are conditional changes in dependencies
>> depending on library versions.
>
>
> Indeed.  But the ghc release that split up base broke cabalised packages
> with no warning to users until they failed to compile.  Upper bounds were
> put in place to avoid that kind of breakage in the future.

There's also the case where people blindly put something like "base <
10" in the .cabal file, and then it broke on the next GHC release.
This happend with ghc-core-0.5: it completely failed to build with
base-4 (and because cabal-install kept defaulting packages to use
base-3 I think a lot of people missed cases like this and blindly
thought it worked).

I like having upper bounds on version numbers... right up until people
abuse them.

-- 
Ivan Lazar Miljenovic
Ivan.Miljenovic at gmail.com
http://IvanMiljenovic.wordpress.com