[Haskell-cafe] Checking minimum package bounds

[Adam Bergmark]

The only time people seem to get into trouble with too restrictive lower
bounds is if they are using a global/user package db along with the haskell
platform where the versions of some packages are pegged. Common best
practice seems to be to support the last two haskell platform releases, and
that's pretty easy to test against.

As a user it very seldom causes problems when a package is missing lower
bounds. One of the strengths of having upper bounds is that you have an
easier time installing old versions of packages if you need to. When doing
that Cabal (as always) picks the latest versions of dependencies so the
lower bound doesn't matter.

That said I always add some arbitrary (but tested) lower bound for my
packages nowadays. I've never gotten asked to relax it so it doesn't seem
to be a problem in practice.




On Sat, Jul 5, 2014 at 9:59 PM, Edward Z. Yang <ezyang at mit.edu> wrote:

> Hello Omari,
>
> This problem is among several that I am hoping to address with
> the module system work that I am doing this summer at MSR.
>
> The basic algorithm we are planning on implementing calculates a minimal
> library signature which a package would correctly type-check against,
> and then checks whether or not versions of the library implement this
> signature.  A simple version of this check is not hard to do if
> you hook in to GHC after the renaming pass (but considerably more
> difficult if you have to implement it from scratch: renaming is fairly
> nontrivial).  Our approach is efficient: once the signature is computed,
> it is no longer necessary to typecheck the package to test for
> compatibility.
>
> There are a few things our approach won't handle: for example,
> if a signature is made more polymorphic, in a way that the program
> still compiles, we will flag it as a mismatch (the plan is to simply
> require the types be the same.)
>
> Cheers,
> Edward
>
> Excerpts from Omari Norman's message of 2014-07-05 20:37:14 +0100:
> > Often a topic of discussion is making sure that the upper bounds on one's
> > packages are up to date, or even whether upper bounds are a good idea at
> > all.
> >
> > I don't see much discussion on lower bounds. Lower bounds that are
> > needlessly restrictive can get in the way too.  For instance, I could
> just
> > slap "text >= 1.1 && < 1.2" on my package, but this makes things
> needlessly
> > hard for someone trying to make my package work in conjunction with an
> > older one, especially if all I use are basic functions like "pack" that
> > have been around at least since, say. text-0.11.
> >
> > Does anyone have a best practice for testing and verifying lower bounds?
> > Testing the lower bounds and the upper ones is a challenge.  Does anybody
> > bother? I have my sunlight package at
> >
> > http://hackage.haskell.org/package/sunlight
> >
> > but it is really a nasty hack.  I am considering cleaning it up so it is
> > less of a nasty hack but before I do that I wondered if anyone else has
> > ever thought about this problem.
> >
> > Thanks.
> > Omari
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