Platform policy question: API compatability in minor releases

[Duncan Coutts]

On Tue, 2009-05-12 at 18:21 -0300, Felipe Lessa wrote:
> On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 10:05:55AM -0400, Isaac Dupree wrote:
> > I think this raises an interesting question: the newly updated
> > (for example,)opengl package might strive to work with the
> > existing release Haskell Platform, rather than require newer
> > versions of other HP libraries also.  Of course, cabal-install
> > will deal with the latter too, it just leads to a few more
> > dependency problems (& stability/testedness problems?).
> 
> I guess HP will depend on exact minor versions of the libraries.
> Does that mean that the new shiny OpenGL package can't depend on
> the old HP because it would indirectly depend on an older version
> of itself?
> 
> Are we encouraged to depend on HP at all, or should we always
> target the packages themselves and leave HP on Hackage just for
> completeness?

Nothing should depend on a meta-package like the haskell-platform
package. The Linux distro community have plenty of experience with this
and this is their policy. It overly constrains everything.

In any case, the platform meta-package exports nothing so you'd have to
specify dependencies on the things you use anyway. It'd be redundant
except to constrain the versions of dependencies, which is exactly why
people should not do it (we might make hackage enforce this if it
becomes a problem).

Duncan