[Haskell-cafe] Hackage inconsistent? (pandoc.cabal in 1.13.1)

[Erik Hesselink]

I was a bit hesitant about using this feature as well. We've had some
confusion when we used it [1][2][3]. The Nix guys also seem to be
having some trouble fitting it into their workflow [4]. But in [1] I
did a quick grep to see how many packages used the feature, and there
are already quite a lot. There is an 'x-revision' property added to
the cabal file in the index, so in theory I guess tools could learn to
deal with it.

In general I think the biggest win for this feature is not even in
relaxing bounds, but in tightening them when it turns out they're too
loose. Previously cabal was always free to pick an old, unconstrained
version and would often do so, leading to type errors during builds.

Erik

[1] https://github.com/silkapp/rest/issues/57
[2] https://github.com/silkapp/aeson-utils/issues/1
[3] https://github.com/silkapp/json-schema/issues/12
[4] https://github.com/NixOS/cabal2nix/issues/84

On Mon, Oct 27, 2014 at 8:30 PM, John MacFarlane <jgm at berkeley.edu> wrote:
> I must say, I did pause a bit before making this change to
> pandoc on Hackage, precisely because I realized that the
> cabal file in the package would not match the one on
> Hackage.
>
> But I went ahead, assuming that if the means were provided
> to make this kind of change, it should be okay.
>
> It is time-consuming for me to make a proper pandoc
> release.  I need to write up release notes, rebuild the
> website, generate and test the binary packages on various
> different platforms, upload to github releases and Hackage,
> send announcement emails, etc.  Even with automation this
> all takes work.  I'd rather not have to do this every time a
> version bound changes on a dependent package, so I like this
> way of making minor tweaks to version bounds; I hope I
> can be persuaded that it's not a bad idea.
>
> John
>
>
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