qualified imports, PVP and so on

[Johan Tibell]

Hi Michael,

On Wed, Feb 26, 2014 at 6:45 AM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com>wrote:

> That's essentially it. I'll give one of the examples I ran into. (Names
> omitted on purpose, if the involved party wants to identify himself, please
> do so, I just didn't feel comfortable doing so without your permission.)
> Version 0.2 of monad-logger included MonadLogger instances for IO and other
> base monads. For various reasons, these were removed, and the version
> bumped to 0.3. This is in full compliance with the PVP.
>
> persistent depends on monad-logger. It can work with either version 0.2 or
> 0.3 of monad-logger, and the cabal file allows this via `monad-logger >=
> 0.2 && < 0.4` (or something like that). Again, full PVP compliance.
>
> A user wrote code against persistent when monad-logger version 0.2 was
> available. He used a function that looked like:
>
> runDatabase :: MonadLogger m => Persistent a -> m a
>
> (highly simplified). In his application, he used this in the IO monad. He
> depended on persistent with proper lower and upper bounds. Once again, full
> PVP compliance.
>
> Once I released version 0.3 of monad-logger, his next build automatically
> upgraded him to monad-logger 0.3, and suddenly his code broke, because
> there's no MonadLogger instance for IO.
>
> Now *if* the program had been using a system like "cabal freeze" or the
> like, this could have never happened: cabal wouldn't be trying to
> automatically upgrade to monad-logger 0.3.
>

I'm trying to wrap my head around this.

 * Is runDatabase above a function in persistent or related packages or a
function that the user wrote?
 * What was the user's dependency range for monad-logger? If he is using
the IO instance of MonadLogger from monad-logger, he ought to have a
monad-logger == 2.0.* dependency (since removing instances require a major
version bump.)
 * Does any involved package use orphan instances?

Cheers,
Johan
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