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Showing posts from June, 2015

The Problem with Curation

Recently I received a question from a user asking about "cabal hell" when installing one of my packages. The scenario in question worked fine for us, but for some reason it wasn't working for the user. When users report problems like this they usually do not provide enough information for us to solve it. So then we begin the sometimes arduous back and forth process of gathering the information we need to diagnose the problem and suggest a workaround or implement a fix. In this particular case luck was on our side and the user's second message just happened to include the key piece of information. The problem in this case was that they were using stackage instead of the normal hackage build that people usually use. Using stackage locks down your dependency bounds to a single version. The user reporting the problem was trying to add additional dependencies to his project and those dependencies required different versions. Stackage was taking away degrees of fre