[Haskell-cafe] Backward compatibility

[Adrian May]

>
> Yes, I try it out sometimes.  And if it works, great.  If not, too bad,
> I'll wait until the next Haskell Platform.  I don't whine about it in
> public.
>

May I venture a guess that you never tried to manage a 5-10 million line
project?

That's what I do. I'm not a programmer, I'm a manager. I run teams of a few
dozen people on subprojects within huge telecom-related projects, and my
job is to try and keep it all from collapsing in a heap of bugs.

If you had any experience of that you'd run a mile from any technology with
this hit and miss attitude. I can't tell people what version they should be
using because half of them work for a completely different company. They
have their own dependencies coming from other projects that I'm not even
allowed to know about. One of the ways I keep codebases alive is by telling
people not to assume that somebody else is following the instructions in
their heads. If anybody in my team wants to assume anything about the
versions of anything they interact with, they'll need a very good argument
as to why they can't make their bit more flexible. But I never had to be
scared of upgrading any compiler, except python that is.

Is anybody in the Haskell community still interested in attracting new
users? If so I suggest you go play with Ruby on Rails. Then you'll know
what it's like to approach a complex and unfamiliar system where every
crumb requires a precise version of every other. If you had my job, you'd
find out what you needed to know within half an hour.



>
>> So I installed 7.4.2 from source but that confused cabal because my
>> attempt to uninstall the ubuntu package with 7.4.1 in had failed with
>> dependency-hell. Figuring out why (or even that) my packages weren't being
>> seen was the puzzle I was referring to.
>>
>
> So the complaint is about Ubuntu?
>

I think we all know that package management is tricky and ubuntu are
struggling, but that would be another topic.


>
>
>> The point is that we wouldn't have to be talking about this at all if
>> people didn't move the furniture around all the time.
>>
>
> That's not a very good point. It sounds as though you're the one who moved
> furniture around, considering that you managed to mix up Ubuntu's GHC
> package with your hand-built ones.
>
>
Well now you're just playing with words. I've already explained how it
happened.
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