[Haskell-cafe] Fwd: Compatibility etiquette for apps, with cabal sandboxes and `stack`

[Omari Norman]

On Sun, Nov 29, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Paolo Giarrusso <p.giarrusso at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> IIUC, people used to spend nontrivial effort making their Haskell tools
> work across a range of dependencies, and be careful about dropping support
> for older ones.
>

Given the tools we had, this was not easy.  I was never aware of any tool
that substantially helped with making sure that a package remained
compatible with the range of packages that was theoretically allowed by the
package's .cabal file.


> Do cabal sandboxes or Stack reduce that need, at least for applications?*
> Or conversely, how bad is it to restrict support to users having them? I
> guess I am asking about common policies, but this probably depends on
> adoption of those tools.
>
>
IMO there is really no one right answer to this question.  It depends on
how nice you are, or whether someone is paying you.  Obviously if someone
is paying you, do as she says or do what she needs.  If no one is paying
you, then how nice do you want to be by expending the work?  Honestly I'm
not very nice.  I keep stuff working in the current Stackage Nightly but
that's it.  Maintaining compatibility with huge dependency matrices is just
an enormous amount of work.  In my view, someone installing an application
can just use stack and Stackage.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/attachments/20151129/dc3eb1ba/attachment.html>