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Showing posts from May, 2014

Implicit Blacklisting for Cabal

I've been thinking about all the Haskell PVP discussion that's been going on lately. It should be no secret by now that I am a PVP proponent. I'm not here to debate the PVP in this post, so for this discussion let's assume that the PVP is a good thing and should be adopted by all packages published on Hackage. More specifically, let's assume this to mean that every package should specify upper bounds on all dependencies, and that most of the time these bounds will be of the form "< a.b". Recently there has been discussion about problems encountered when packages that have not been using upper bounds change and start using them. The recent issue with the HTTP package is a good example of this. Roughly speaking the problem is that if foo-1.2 does not provide upper bounds on it's dependency bar, the constraint solver is perpetually "poisoned" because foo-1.2 will always be a candidate even long after bar has become incompatible with f