Gearing up for a cabal-install-1.16.0 release

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Fri, Sep 28, 2012 at 5:55 PM, Duncan Coutts <duncan.coutts at googlemail.com
> wrote:

> Being able to do this relies on both editing on the server, and for
> the client to actually use the updated .cabal file. So this patch
> provides the client side part of the feature. The server side already
> works (we've actually made quite a few edits to .cabal files on
> hackage post-release) but the UI for it will improve significantly in
> the new server which we expect to go live during the lifetime of this
> next cabal-install release. So getting the feature in now would be a
> real help to everyone (and ideally, most users will never notice).
>

This feels like a big piece of work to be pushing in right before a release.

It worries me because now there's an invisible piece of metadata floating
around that neither OS packagers nor library maintainers can see. In a way,
this feels strictly worse than having a package just plain break, because
it's not hard to imagine a cycle of "package breaks; magic invisible
dependency update silently fixes it; new version is released; package
re-breaks because maintainer never found out about previous breakage".

I could be convinced that in fact everything is going to be awesome and it
will all somehow work, but in the short term I'd prefer to delay sprinkling
invisible dependency pixie dust on packages, and let this wait until the
next release, 3 months down the line.
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