Re: AW: [Caml-list] GODI is shutting down

[Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@ocamlpro.com>]

> On Wed, Jul 24, 2013 at 12:25 PM, Thomas Gazagnaire <thomas@ocamlpro.com> wrote:
>> However, the main problem (the one I wanted to point out) still remains: every time you want to fix a constraint you have to change your _oasis, modify the package tarball, and make a new release -- which means you can never fix constraints on already released packages. But I guess in this case, it's fine if the _oasis and OPAM files are not in sync.
> 
> The way I see it is that a package that contains incorrect dependency
> information, even if it's just a version thing, has a bug and should
> be fixed.  I agree this is annoying to package developers, but fixing
> bugs is always annoying ;-)

Unfortunately, in practice this is a nightmare as dependency constraints are mostly open: when you create a new (incompatible release), you usually invalidate existing package constraint boundaries of already released packages. For instance, let's have A, depending on B >= 1.0. Later you release B version "1.1" which breaks A. Then, you need to upgrade the dependency constraints of A to 1.0 <= B <= 1.1, ie. release a new version of A. This can in turn force you to release new packages and so on.

Cabal is dealing with that by automatically restricting the constraint boundaries[1] and I'm not very happy with that either.

--
Thomas