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Contributing.md

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Many other packages depend on ansi-terminal. As at February 2024, over 4,700 packages on Hackage depend on it, directly or indirectly. Consider raising an issue to discuss a proposed change before making a pull request.

The ansi-terminal and ansi-terminal-types packages aim to have:

  • limited dependency on other packages, even those included with GHC;
  • a high degree of backwards compatibility with earlier versions of GHC; and
  • comprehensive and high-quality Haddock documentation.

As of ansi-terminal-1.0.1, the package aims to be compatible with versions of GHC from GHC 7.10.1 (released March 2015). GHC 7.10.1 comes with:

  • base-4.8.0.0

The ansi-terminal package also depends on:

  • ansi-terminal-types, which exposes module System.Console.ANSI.Types. The package is provided to avoid circular dependencies in some circumstances; and
  • colour-2.1.0 or later, used for 24-bit colour (Colour, RGB, toSRGB and toSRGB24).

The ansi-terminal package aims to avoid a dependency on the Win32 package, because of its dependency on the filepath package. It does that by reproducing the small part of the Win32 and mintty packages on which it would otherwise rely.

The ansi-terminal and ansi-terminal-types packages achieve that backward compatibility by using C Pre-Processor (CPP) directives. The CPP GHC extension is specified for the libraries in the Cabal files.

Separate 'Unix' and Windows versions of the package used to exist because, before Windows 10 version 1511, the native terminal software on Windows did not support the control sequences and emulation was required. Microsoft has not supported Windows XP since 8 April 2014 (and GHC has not supported Windows XP from GHC 8.0.1 of May 2016); Windows Server 2003 since 14 July 2015; Windows Vista since 11 April 2017; Windows 7, service pack 1 since 10 January 2023; Windows 8.1 since 10 January 2023; and Windows 10, version 1507 (which 1511 of December 2015 updated) since 9 May 2017. Consequently, there is no longer any version of Windows that both has support by Microsoft and needs emulation.

The package uses GHC's 'Safe Haskell' language extension Safe (introduced in GHC 7.2.1 but not stable until GHC 7.4.1) to add flags explicitly to all modules.

The source code generally follows Johan Tibell's style guide, but with code blocks indented with 2 spaces (rather than 4 spaces).

Pull requests should be organised into logical commits with useful commit messages. There is no need to change the package version number or update CHANGELOG.md. This will be done by the package maintainers when a further version is published on Hackage.