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

[Brandon Allbery]

On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 10:38 AM, Daniel Trstenjak <
daniel.trstenjak at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Feb 25, 2014 at 10:12:29AM -0500, Brandon Allbery wrote:
> > Is it better to save a developer some work, or is it better to force
> that work
> > onto end users?
>
> What is an end user? Someone installing a package containing an executable?
> Then the package is an end point in the dependency graph and the PVP can
> work pretty well for this case.
>
> But if the package contains a library, then the end user is also the
> developer, so you can only choose which kind of pain you prefer.


*A* developer, but not the developer of the package with the loose upper
bound or the package that refused to compile with incomprehensible errors
because of it, and generally not in a position to recognize the reason for
the errors because they don't know the internals of the package they're
trying to use. And I am certain of this because I'm sitting in #haskell
fielding questions from them multiple times a day when some package gets
broken by an overly lax or missing upper bound.

Also note that overly strict versioning certainly also leads to breakage
--- but it's reported clearly by cabal as a version issue, not as ghc
vomiting up unexpected errors from something that is presented as a curated
package that should build without problems.

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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