Dependencies/backwards compatibility in Hackage

Björn Bringert bringert at cs.chalmers.se
Thu Feb 1 10:51:21 EST 2007


Björn Bringert wrote:
> Sven Moritz Hallberg wrote:
>> Björn Bringert <bringert at cs.chalmers.se>, 2007-02-01 15.36 +0100:
>>> Ross Paterson wrote:
>>> I think that the correct solution to this problem would be to make a 
>>> new release of haxr (which used to be XmlRpc) that works with HaXml 
>>> 1.17.
>>
>> But then what is your answer to the problem of things breaking in the
>> time between the release of HaXml 1.17 and making a new release of haxr?
>>
>> -Sven
> 
> I don't really have one, expect fast development :-).
> 
> One possibility would be to have a convention about version number 
> changes when libraries make backwards-incompatible API changes. E.g. 
> HaXml should change major version whenever a change would break 
> something that depends on it. Then all libraries which depend on HaXml 
> could specify:
> 
> Build-depends: HaXml >= 1.13 && < 2
> 
> or something like that. The only problem would be that it would be 
> overly restrictive if a HaXml 2.0 comes out that the current version of 
> the depending library actually works with.

Eh that is what Ross already said. Sorry about that. This is the 
approach taken by Unix shared libraries by the way.

/Björn


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