Interesting data point. I think my initial thoughts can be summarized with the suggestion that this thread would be better served by a little irony and a new subject: "Reuse Considered Harmful".
On Thu, Aug 30, 2012 at 1:26 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan <[email protected]>wrote: > Since the release of the GHC 7.6 RC, I've been going through my packages > and fixing up build problems so that people who upgrade to 7.6 will have a > smooth ride. > > Sad to say, my experience of 7.6 is that it has felt like a particularly > rough release for backwards incompatibility. I wanted to quantify the pain, > so I did some research, and here's what I found. > > I maintain 25 open source Haskell packages. Of these, the majority have > needed updates due to the GHC 7.6 release: > > - base16-bytestring > - blaze-textual > - bloomfilter > - configurator > - criterion > - double-conversion > - filemanip > - HDBC-mysql > - mwc-random > - pcap > - pool > - riak-haskell-client > - snappy > - text > - text-format > - text-icu > > That's 16 out of 25 packages I've had to update. I've also either reported > bugs on, or had to fix, several other people's packages along the way > (maybe four?). So let's say I've run into problems with 20 out of the > combined 29 packages of mine and my upstreams. > > The reasons for these problems fall into three bins: > > - Prelude no longer exports catch, so a lot of "import Prelude hiding > (catch)" had to change. > - The FFI now requires constructors to be visible, so "CInt" has to be > imported as "CInt(..)". > - bytestring finally got bumped to 0.10, so many upper bounds had to > be relaxed (*cf* my suggestion that the upper-bounds-by-default policy > is destructive). > > It has been a lot of work to test 29 packages, and then modify, rebuild, > and release 20 of them. It has consumed most of my limited free time for > almost two weeks. Worse, this has felt like make-work, of no practical > benefit to anyone beyond scrambling to restore the status quo ante. > > If over half of my packages needed fixing, I'm alarmed at the thought of > the effects on the rest of Hackage. > > I'm torn over this. I understand and agree with the impetus to improve the > platform by tidying things up, and yet just two seemingly innocuous changes > (catch and FFI) have forced me to do a bunch of running to stand still. > > I don't have any suggestions about what to do; I know that it's hard to > estimate the downstream effects of what look like small changes. And so I'm > not exactly complaining. Call this an unhappy data point. > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe > >
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