Announcing the Yesod Platform

There have been lots of emails, blog posts, Reddit threads and Google+ discussions recently about Cabal dependency hell. I'm certain that the community as a whole, and Andres Loeh and Duncan Coutts in particular, will be able to solve these problems thoroughly in the long run. But in the short term, we still have a problem.

I posted last week about cabal-nirvana. While it certainly would seem to solve many of our problems, it's a bit like using a tactical nuke to kill a mosquito. But, based on the same approach and code, I'd like to announce a new solution: yesod-platform. This approach- championed very successfully by Felipe Lessa- involves releasing a meta-package to Hackage which contains strict version bounds for each dependency of Yesod (excluding bootlibs).

There's actually not much more to the story than that. Instead of running cabal install yesod, just run cabal install yesod-platform. You can also put the dependency in your cabal file. We have no actual proof yet, but if you put it in your cabal file, you likely want to make it the first entry, to make sure that the top-down dependency solver doesn't get confused.

This is obviously a new, untested technique, and there may be some hurdles yet to come. But I encourage everyone to give this new approach a shot and see if it solves your problems.

What about cabal-dev?

This is an orthogonal issue. You can use yesod-platform with cabal-dev if you want. cabal-dev solves the sandboxing issue, while yesod-platform ensures that you have comatible versions of packages.

Future improvements

The only improvement I know of right now is to include some serious benchmarks with the yesod-platform. This will allow us to make sure that we're not accidently adopting newer dependencies that have major performance regressions. But if anyone else has some ideas, I'd love to hear them.