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

[Erik Hesselink]

On Tue, Aug 28, 2012 at 6:09 PM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 10:52 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan <bos at serpentine.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> 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.
>
> Not to flog a dead horse, but:
>
> Just yesterday we had a communication from someone on the Gentoo Linux
> packaging team that their checksum validation for the bloomfilter package
> was failing. This problem arose because of the hand-editing of the package,
> but confusion arose in the bug report due to misattribution of the source of
> the error.
>
> https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/1017
>
> Hand-editing uploaded tarballs: just don't do it, kids!

Not to flog a dead horse, but:

All our builds broke again yesterday due to this bug. The package was
iteratee-0.8.9.3, though given the vocal opposition of Bryan
O'Sullivan, I won't advocate fixing it in place just now.

I've built the test in the Cabal library to reject packages with
conditionals in the test-suites section. I'm just not sure if we want
to implement this on hackage, and for how long.

I'm not quite sure how old this cabal version is that is causing the
problems, but the haskell platform it comes with is 2011.2, which
means the second quarter of 2011, so that is a little over a year old.
It comes with Ubuntu 11.10, which is less than a year old.

I was going to argue to support versions of cabal (and GHC) for at
least a year. That means that if you're on Ubuntu, which has releases
every 6 months, you have 6 months to upgrade. However, that year has
already expired for cabal 0.10, or is about to expire if you count the
Ubuntu release it came with.

So what do others think? Does the haskell community want to support
anything other than the bleeding edge? If so, for how long?

Regards,

Erik