[Haskell-cafe] Platform Versioning Policy: upper bounds are not our friends

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2012 at 12:34 PM, MigMit <miguelimo38 at yandex.ru> wrote:

> What if instead of upper (and lower) bounds we just specify our interface
> requirements?


We already have a simple versioning scheme for which, despite it being easy
to grasp, we have amply demonstrated that we cannot make it work well,
because it has emergent properties that cause it to not scale well across a
large community.

Any vastly more complicated and detailed versioning scheme has a huge
burden to prove that it won't collapse dramatically more quickly. (Frankly,
I think that anything involving "specify every detail of your known
dependencies" is dead on arrival from a practical standpoint: it's way too
much work.)

For that matter, I think that this burden applies to my own proposal to
omit upper bounds unless they're needed.

Fortunately, we now have several years of historical dependency data that
we can go back and mine, and thereby try to model the effects of particular
suggested changes.
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