Cabal Compatibility

Cabal developers have implemented great improvements over recent years! My open source software does not yet make use of many of the improvements, however. The reason for this is that I try to increase the extent of open source software in an attempt to make it more easy to use across a wide range of environments. I have to do without features such as internal sub-libraries and common stanzas, but the software can be built using older versions of cabal-install.

Cabal Versions

I currently try to make my open source software compatible with the following versions.

Different programming communities have different feelings toward compatibility. In the Haskell community, core library maintainers tend to take compatibility seriously while many other community members tend to promote use of bleeding-edge releases over compatibility.

For open source Haskell software, I would like to maintain compatibility with systems that are five years old. I look forward to using features introduced in Cabal 2 in late 2023!

Haskell GitHub Actions

I use GitHub Actions for running continuous integration tests, using Haskell GitHub Actions. A variety of GHC and Cabal versions are available for use.

Currently, I configure three types of jobs:

1. latest-cabal jobs build and test software using various versions of GHC with the latest cabal-install release.
2. stack jobs build and test software using Stack configurations for various versions of GHC.
3. cabal jobs build and test software using various versions of cabal-install with a fixed version of GHC.

For example, see the current CI configuration for TTC (Textual Type Classes). The latest-cabal jobs test all of the above GHC versions. The stack jobs do not test GHC 9.0.1 because there is not an LTS release for that version yet. The cabal jobs do not test Cabal 1.24 because that version is not available or Cabal 2.2 because that version fails to install in the GitHub Actions environment. Note that the cabal jobs use the oldest supported version of GHC.