[Haskell-cafe] PVP question

[Dan Burton]

In other words, the PVP is not rigorously specified, and this particular
question is uncharted territory.

My initial interpretation of the PVP is one of subtyping. I consider
loosening type signatures as a minor version bump, because the new thing
still fits into holes shaped like the old thing.

However, seen a different way, you could say that previously, IO () was
just a value, but now, it's (forall a. IO a), which is basically (a:Type ->
IO a), if Haskell were dependently typed. Going from a value to a function
is definitely a major change.

Was that sufficiently unhelpful? :P I think my conclusion is perhaps that
the PVP should remain undefined on this particular question, since I see no
obvious answer. Or, since the PVP already encourages a cautious
over-estimate of what constitutes a breaking change, perhaps we should go
with this fallback: "when in doubt, call it a major change."

-- Dan Burton

On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 9:10 AM, Roman Cheplyaka <roma at ro-che.info> wrote:
>
> Almost any API change can break existing code.
>
> For example, adding a new function can break code.
>
> I thought the guiding principle for PVP was how likely it is that a
> piece of client code will break, not if that's theoretically possible.
>
> On 15/12/14 11:44, Johan Tibell wrote:
> > I think the question is: can this change cause existing code to stop
> > compiling (perhaps assuming people aren't using -Werror)? I don't think
> > it can but perhaps generalizing the type could make type inference fail
> > somewhere due to an ambiguous type.
> >
> > We really need a PVP guide that just lists lots of examples, each with a
> > note of what kind of change it is (i.e. major, minor, or patch).
> >
> > On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 10:00 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com
> > <mailto:michael at snoyman.com>> wrote:
> >
> >     I'm a little bit uncertain of the PVP guidelines in a certain
> >     case[1], so I'd like to get some guidance/clarity. Suppose I have a
> >     library which provides the function:
> >
> >     myFunction :: IO ()
> >     myFunction = forever $ putStrLn "Still here" >> threadDelay 10^6
> >
> >     Later, I realize (or someone points out to me) that I've
> >     over-specified the type signature, and really myFunction should be:
> >
> >         myFunction :: IO a
> >
> >     In this case, does the PVP specify that we should have a minor or a
> >     major version bump? I'm not certain if this counts as a breaking
> >     change or not.
> >
> >     [1] https://github.com/fpco/streaming-commons/pull/13
>
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