[Haskell-cafe] Cabal install fails due to recent HUnit

[Erik Hesselink]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 7:52 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 9:57 AM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> I'm seeing this again, on abstract-deque-0.1.6. Ross, can you fix it
>> again?
>
>
> Hang on a second.
>
> The reason you're seeing build breakage is that the .cabal files of the
> broken packages were edited in-place without communicating with any of the
> package authors.
>
> I understand that the collective intentions around this were good, but by
> "fixing" things without telling anyone, package maintainers have no way to
> know that anything has happened. Now we are seeing the problem begin to
> recur as people issue new releases that don't incorporate those changes.
>
> So. Let's have a little conversation about how to handle this sustainably
> before wasting more of Ross's time.

Yes, you are right. So the question is how long to support systems
with the old cabal 0.10. This is the one included with the previous
haskell platform (and thus lots of linux distro's), which is less than
a year old. But it's also pretty old, since there weren't any cabal
releases for a while.

The other question is how useful test suites in a released package
are. Aren't they much more useful (and used more often) in source
repositories?

If we do agree that we want to prevent this problem for a while (which
I'm not sure about), we should probably do it by preventing uploads
for packages like this. That way, package maintainers will know what
is going on, just like with the other 'package quality' issues hackage
enforces.

Erik