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

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 11:39 AM, Erik Hesselink <hesselink at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> 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.
>

That's a very awkward situation. At least in the future, Johan and I have a
proposal to make this class of problem more avoidable by introducing a
regular release schedule. See the thread that starts here for details:
http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2012-August/008987.html

For the state of things today, it's not obvious to me what to do.

It's burdensome to ask package authors to remove stuff from their packages
because it can't be handled by a broken version of cabal, especially since
there's no upper bound on how long that broken version will be floating
around. We'd essentially be giving up on this feature semi-permanently,
which would make me sad because it's so useful.

Just as unappealing is the idea of breaking builds for people who, through
no fault of their own, are using the broken cabal. However, at least this
class of people has the incentives aligned to do something about their
problem: either upgrade cabal-install or their distro.

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?
>

They're certainly useful in source repositories, and we have historically
chosen not to make a distinction between what's in a source repo and what
gets shipped to end users via cabal, which makes sense to me.
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