[Haskell-cafe] Versioning of libraries bundled with GHC pre-releases

[Dan Burton]

+1 I would appreciate this.

-- Dan Burton

On Tue, Jan 16, 2018 at 10:35 AM, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:

>
> TL;DR. We propose to start following the PVP for core libraries shipped
>        with GHC alpha release. Let us know what you think.
>
>
> Hello everyone,
>
> GHC has recently been reworking its release policy, increasing the
> release cadence to two releases per year. We hope that this change
> facilitates earlier and more thorough testing of GHC. Of course,
> a compiler is worth little if no real-world packages can be built with
> it.
>
> Historically library maintainers have been reluctant to offer releases
> claiming compatibility with pre-release GHCs due to the lax versioning
> guarantees offered by such pre-releases. Specifically, changes to
> libraries shipped with GHC pre-releases have historically not had
> proper distinct version numbers, causing unnecessary breakage for
> released code (e.g. [1]).
>
> To make maintainers feel more at ease with releasing libraries
> compatible with GHC alpha releases, we propose to start using the
> Package Versioning Policy (PVP) [2] to version GHC's core libraries with
> each alpha release. That is, libraries which are not source-identical
> will get at very least a minor bump with each alpha release.
>
> By "core libraries" we mean the set of:
>
>  * base
>  * template-haskell
>  * integer-gmp
>  * integer-simple
>  * hpc
>  * ghci
>  * ghc-compact
>  * all GHC dependencies not maintained by GHC HQ
>  * ghc-prim
>  * ghc-boot
>  * ghc-boot-th
>
> Following the PVP will allow maintainers to safely release libraries to
> Hackage without fear that they will break when the final GHC 8.4.1
> release is made, easing the testing process for everyone.
>
> If you have an opinion one way or another on this matter please do share
> it on this list.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
>
> [1] https://github.com/tibbe/hashable/issues/143
> [2] https://pvp.haskell.org/
>
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