[Haskell] Re: Please check your dependencies on fgl

[Don Stewart]

Hey Robby,

Yeah, two documents:

    The "PVP"
        http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy

    The Package Addition Policy for the Haskell Platform
        http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/AddingPackages

robby:
> Hi all. Just thought I'd poke my head in here (perhaps where I'm not
> wanted...) to ask: is there a rationale and/or guidelines for how to
> use version numbers in hackage somewhere that I could read?
> 
> I ask because we worry that similar things to this discussion would
> come up in PLaneT, the Racket package management scheme (if you're
> curious see http://planet.racket-lang.org/ for the site or
> http://docs.racket-lang.org/planet/index.html for the documentation).
> 
> We preemptively resolved this kind of thing by tweaking the semantics
> of version numbers. Specifically, if you ask for version 1.3, say, of
> a package, PLaneT will give you the largest version that has the same
> major version number, ie the largest 1.x (that is compatible with the
> version of Racket you're using, that is). The idea was that when
> changes to the functionality happen, the package maintainer would bump
> the major number and feel safe that old uses would not break. This
> seems to have worked pretty well in practice, fwiw (PLaneT has been
> around for six years so far).
> 
> (We took inspiration for this particular issue by the way we've seen
> major version numbers move into package names in various linux
> distributions.)
> 
> Robby