[Haskell] Re: Trying to install binary-0.4

[Don Stewart]

igloo:
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2007 at 05:19:31PM +0200, Udo Stenzel wrote:
> > Ian Lynagh wrote:
> > > People interested in making it easy to use new versions of packages with
> > > old compiler releases can make a small script that installs empty Cabal
> > > packages called bytestring, containers, array, etc.
> > 
> > That completely misses the fact that bytestring cannot be upgraded, no
> > matter how many fake packages are available.
> 
> Ah, you mean the problem is that it really does depend on some change in
> bytestring (the internal API?), rather than just having a dependency on
> the bytestring package?
> 
> Then yes, things are not so easy. Part of the motivation for splitting
> up base is so that this sort of thing is easier in the future.

Yes, this was exactly the motivation for not back porting the binary
library to 6.4 and earlier: it depends on representation details of
ByteString that I'm not going to cpp into portability.

If I understand correctly, the main issue for Udo is simply that the
MonadFix instance is required by his code, and isn't available in binary
0.3 -- the version to be used on earlier GHCs. Is that right Udo?

If that's the case, manually inserting that instance when using binary
0.3 seems easy enough.

-- Don