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

[Erik Hesselink]

Hub looks interesting, I'll have to try it out (though I'm not on an
RPM based distro). But isn't this the goal of things like semantic
versioning [0] and the PVP? To know that you can safely upgrade to a
bugfix release, and relavily safely to a minor release, but on a major
release, you have to take care?

Haskell makes it much easier to see if you can use a new major (or
minor) version of a library, since the type checker catches many (but
not all!) problems for you. However, this leads to libraries breaking
their API's much more easily, and that in turn causes the problems
voiced in this thread. However, fixing all versions seems like a bit
of a blunt instrument, as it means I'll have to do a lot of work to
bring even bug fixes in.

Erik

[0] http://semver.org/



On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 3:13 PM, Chris Dornan <chris at chrisdornan.com> wrote:
> I think we should encourage stable build environments to know precisely
> which package versions they have been using and to keep using them until
> told otherwise. Even when the types and constraints all work out there is a
> risk that upgraded packages will break. Everybody here wants cabal to just
> install the packages without problem, but if you want to insulate yourself
> from package upgrades surely sticking with proven combinations is the way to
> go.
>
> Chris
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org
> [mailto:haskell-cafe-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of Erik Hesselink
> Sent: 20 August 2012 08:33
> To: Bryan O'Sullivan
> Cc: haskell-cafe at haskell.org
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Platform Versioning Policy: upper bounds are not
> our friends
>
> I am strongly against this, especially for packages in the platform.
>
> If you fail to specify an upper bound, and I depend on your package, your
> dependencies can break my package! For example, say I develop executable A
> and I depend on library B == 1.0. Library B depends on library C >= 0.5 (no
> upper bound). Now C 0.6 is released, which is incompatible with B. This
> suddenly breaks my build, even though I have not changed anything about my
> code or dependencies. This goes against the 'robust' aspect mentioned as one
> of the properties of the Haskell platform, and against the Haskell
> philosophy of correctness in general.
>
> This is not an imaginary problem. At my company, we've run into these
> problems numerous times already. Since we also have people who are not
> experts at Cabal and the Haskell ecosystem building our software, this can
> be very annoying. The fix is also not trivial: we can add a dependency on a
> package we don't use to all our executables or we can fork the library (B,
> in the example above) and add an upper bound/fix the code. Both add a lot of
> complexity that we don't want. Add to that the build failures and associated
> emails from CI systems like Jenkins.
>
> I can see the maintenance burder you have, since we have to do the same for
> our code. But until some Cabal feature is added to ignore upper bounds or
> specify soft upper bounds, please follow the PVP, also in this regard. It
> helps us maintain a situation where only our own actions can break our
> software.
>
> Erik
>
> On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
> wrote:
>> Hi, folks -
>>
>> I'm sure we are all familiar with the phrase "cabal dependency hell"
>> at this point, as the number of projects on Hackage that are intended
>> to hack around the problem slowly grows.
>>
>> I am currently undergoing a fresh visit to that unhappy realm, as I
>> try to rebuild some of my packages to see if they work with the GHC
>> 7.6 release candidate.
>>
>> A substantial number of the difficulties I am encountering are related
>> to packages specifying upper bounds on their dependencies. This is a
>> recurrent problem, and its source lies in the recommendations of the
>> PVP itself (problematic phrase highlighted in bold):
>>
>>> When publishing a Cabal package, you should ensure that your
>>> dependencies in the build-depends field are accurate. This means
>>> specifying not only lower bounds, but also upper bounds on every
> dependency.
>>
>>
>> I understand that the intention behind requiring tight upper bounds
>> was good, but in practice this has worked out terribly, leading to
>> depsolver failures that prevent a package from being installed, when
>> everything goes smoothly with the upper bounds relaxed. The default
>> response has been for a flurry of small updates to packages in which
>> the upper bounds are loosened, thus guaranteeing that the problem will
>> recur in a year or less. This is neither sensible, fun, nor sustainable.
>>
>> In practice, when an author bumps a version of a depended-upon
>> package, the changes are almost always either benign, or will lead to
>> compilation failure in the depending-upon package. A benign change
>> will obviously have no visible effect, while a compilation failure is
>> actually better than a depsolver failure, because it's more informative.
>>
>> This leaves the nasty-but-in-my-experience-rare case of runtime
>> failures caused by semantic changes. In these instances, a downstream
>> package should reactively add an upper bound once a problem is discovered.
>>
>> I propose that the sense of the recommendation around upper bounds in
>> the PVP be reversed: upper bounds should be specified only when there
>> is a known problem with a new version of a depended-upon package.
>>
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