Bumping package version numbers in the HP (Was: Haskell Platform Proposal: add transformers and revise the mtl package to depend on it)

[Duncan Coutts]

On 2 November 2010 14:00, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:

> How do we decide whether to include new versions of packages in the
> next HP release. For bugfix releases it should be a no-brainer, just
> include them. What about API additions?

There is a distinction between HP minor and major releases. API
changes in major releases are fine, for minor releases we stick to bug
fixes only.

> Didn't we chose to not use a new version of some package because
>  it added a bunch of modules in the Data.* namespace?

That was because it simultaniously split into multiple packages and
those new packages did not keep the old namespace but used modules in
Data.*. We decided that this meant they were new dependencies and new
deps have to go through the proposal process.

> As you see above two packages have increased the minor version number
> (cgi and HTTP) and one has increased the major version number
> (QuickCheck).
>
> In addition to the above three packages, the network package recently
> grew two new modules (adopted from network-bytestring).

This is all fine. There is no problem with API updates.

Where things become more questionable is where there is a major
discontinuity, e.g. a complete reimplementation by a new maintainer
without a clear handover between maintainers.

Duncan