[Haskell-cafe] Monad of no `return` Proposal (MRP): Moving `return` out of `Monad`

[Michael Orlitzky]

On 10/07/2015 02:02 PM, Taru Karttunen wrote:
>>
>> Instead of using #ifdef to handle four different compilers, keep a
>> branch for each. Git is designed to make this easy, and it's usually
>> trivial to merge changes from the master branch back into e.g. the
>> ghc-7.8 branch. That way the code in your master branch stays clean.
>> When you want to stop supporting an old GHC, delete that branch.
> 
> Isn't this hard to do correctly for libraries with Hackage 
> and Cabal and narrowly versioned dependencies and deep
> import graphs?

It can be...

> E.g. when adding a new feature to the library and merging
> it back to the ghc-7.8 branch the versions needed for
> features vs compiler support could end up causing
> complex dependency clauses for users of such libraries.
> 

but can you think of an example where you don't have the same problem
with #ifdef?

If I need to use a new version of libfoo and the new libfoo only
supports ghc-7.10, then I'm screwed either way right?