Consider removing the preferred versions feature

[grayjay]

@phadej and @gbaz suggested removing preferred versions in #1345, so I'm opening a new issue to discuss whether the feature is still needed. Is there a use case for preferring a version that is not the latest, when the latest version shouldn't simply be deprecated?

[grayjay]

cc @ffaf1 @Mikolaj

[ffaf1]

Popular packages which have a “preferred version” on Hackage: amazonka, hxt, hspec, webdriver.

So let me ping @sol, @brendanhay, @UweSchmidt, @erratic-pattern and ask this question:

Is there a cogent reason why you used “preferred version” in the past? Would your package maintainership be hindered if Hackage were to remove (for the future) such possibility?

[brendanhay]

The reason is lost to time, so no, it would not be hindered for amazonka.

[sol]

I think I used this a long time ago to kind of soft deprecate versions < 2.

As long as cabal gives strong preference to the latest version then I think I'm good.

[grayjay]

I just found a mailing list thread linked to from haskell/cabal#401 that mentions two other reasons: https://groups.google.com/g/fa.haskell/c/w53KJZqUie8/m/vtNcO54iorEJ

Actually it does that for specific packages, there's a file in the
hackage index called 'referred-versions':

base < 4
parsec < 3
HaXml == 1.13.*
QuickCheck < 2

These are all cases where there are large numbers of packages that fail
to specify an upper version constraint but break when built with the
later version of the package. In the case of HaXml it is also because
the 1.13 series is the one considered stable by its author.

I think that the use case of protecting packages without upper bounds is probably made obsolete by Hackage metadata revisions.

[UweSchmidt]

No problem with removing that feature. Uwe

…

On Fri, Mar 28, 2025 at 7:34 AM ffaf1 ***@***.***> wrote: Popular packages which have a “preferred version” on Hackage: amazonka, hxt, hspec, webdriver. So let me ping @sol <https://github.com/sol>, @brendanhay <https://github.com/brendanhay>, @UweSchmidt <https://github.com/UweSchmidt>, @erratic-pattern <https://github.com/erratic-pattern> and ask this question: Is there a cogent reason why you used “preferred version” in the past? Would your package maintainership be hindered if Hackage were to remove (for the future) such possibility? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1374 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADF5FZIOQNG4EBDMN7UHUL2WTNNRAVCNFSM6AAAAABZ6OBJIKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDONRQGM2TMNBWHA> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***> [image: ffaf1]*ffaf1* left a comment (haskell/hackage-server#1374) <#1374 (comment)> Popular packages which have a “preferred version” on Hackage: amazonka, hxt, hspec, webdriver. So let me ping @sol <https://github.com/sol>, @brendanhay <https://github.com/brendanhay>, @UweSchmidt <https://github.com/UweSchmidt>, @erratic-pattern <https://github.com/erratic-pattern> and ask this question: Is there a cogent reason why you used “preferred version” in the past? Would your package maintainership be hindered if Hackage were to remove (for the future) such possibility? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#1374 (comment)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AADF5FZIOQNG4EBDMN7UHUL2WTNNRAVCNFSM6AAAAABZ6OBJIKVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43OSLTON2WKQ3PNVWWK3TUHMZDONRQGM2TMNBWHA> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

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