qualified imports, PVP and so on (Was: add new Data.Bits.Bits(bitZero) method)

[Edward Kmett]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 2:51 AM, Daniel Trstenjak <
daniel.trstenjak at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> Hi Sven,
>
> > o_O Dumb question: Can somebody please explain why this doesn't
> > conform to the PVP? I have a very hard time reading that out of
> > http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Package_versioning_policy. Perhaps
> > I'm looking at the wrong document or this interpretation is just
> > wishful thinking...
>
> If I'm getting it right, you don't have to increase a major version
> number if you're e.g. just adding another function.
>
> But if the user of your library imports unqualified or implicit,
> then he will also get your added function and this function might
> conflict with functions in your code base.


Note: this particular concern would be much lessened at least for local
definitions, had we done anything with Lennart's perfectly reasonable
suggestion to change the scoping rules to let local definitions win over
imports. When I mentioned above that I had had half a dozen problems in
five years, four of them would have been resolved successfully by that
proposal.

-Edward
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