The case for curation: Stackage and the PVP

November 12, 2014

GravatarBy Michael Snoyman

A number of months back there was a long series of discussions around the Package Versioning Policy (PVP), and in particular the policy of putting in preemptive upper bounds (that is to say, placing upper bounds before it is proven that they are necessary). Eventually, the conversation died down, and I left some points unsaid in the interests of letting that conversation die. Now that Neil Mitchell kicked up the dust again, I may as well get a few ideas out there.

tl;dr Stackage is simply better tooling, and we should be using better tooling instead of arguing policy. The PVP upper bounds advocates are arguing for a world without sin, and such a world doesn't exist. Get started with Stackage now.

This blog post will be a bit unusual. Since I'm so used to seeing questions, criticisms, and misinformation on this topic, I'm going to interject commonly stated memes throughout this blog post and answer them directly. Hopefully this doesn't cause too much confusion.

As most people reading this are probably aware, I manage the Stackage project. I have a firm belief that the PVP discussions we've been having are, essentially, meaningless for the general use case, and simply improving our tool chain is the right answer. Stackage is one crucial component of that improvement.

But Stackage doesn't really help end users, it's nothing more than a CI system for Hackage. The initial Stackage work may have counted as that, but Stackage was never intended to just be behind the scenes. Stackage server provides a very user-friendly solution for solving packaging problems. While I hope to continue improving the ecosystem- together with the Haskell Platform and Cabal maintainers- Stackage server is already a huge leap forward for most users today. (See also: GPS Haskell.)

The PVP is composed of multiple ideas. I'd like to break it into:

  1. A method for versioning packages based on API changes.
  2. How lower bounds should be set on dependencies.
  3. How upper bounds should be set on dependencies.

Just about everyone I've spoken to agrees with the PVP on (1) and (2), the only question comes up with point (3). The arguments go like this: preemptive upper bounds add a lot of maintainer overhead by requiring them to upload new versions of packages to relax version bounds regularly. (This is somewhat mitigated by the new cabal file editing feature of Hackage, but that has its own problems.) On the other hand, to quote some people on Reddit:

I'd rather make a release that relaxes bounds rather than have EVERY previous version suddenly become unusable for folks

that upper bounds should not be viewed as handcuffs, but rather as useful information about the range of dependencies that is known to work. This information makes the solver's job easier. If you don't provide them, your packages are guaranteed to break as t -> ∞.

These statements are simply false. I can guarantee you with absolute certainty that, regardless of the presence of upper bounds, I will be able to continue to build software written against yesod 1.4 (or any other library/version I'm using today) indefinitely. I may have to use the same compiler version and fiddle with shared libraries a bit if I update my OS. But this notion that packages magically break is simply false.

But I have some code that built two months ago, and I opened it today and it doesn't work! I didn't say that the standard Haskell toolchain supports this correctly. I'm saying that the absence of upper bounds doesn't guarantee that a problem will exist.

Without dancing around the issue any further, let me cut to the heart of the problem: our toolchain makes it the job of every end user to find a consistent build plan. Finding such a build plan is inherently a hard problem, so why are we pushing the work downstream? Furthermore, it's terrible practice for working with teams. The entire team should be working in the same package environment, not each working on "whatever cabal-install decided it should try to build today."

There's a well known, time-tested solution to this problem: curation. It's simple: we have a central person/team/organization that figures out consistent sets of packages, and then provides them to downstream users. Downstream users then never have to deal with battling against large sets of dependencies.

But isn't curation a difficult, time-consuming process? How can the Haskell community support that? Firstly, that's not really an important question, since the curation is already happening. Even if it took a full-time staff of 10 people working around the clock, if the work is already done, it's done. In practice, now that the Stackage infrastructure is in place, curation probably averages out to 2 hours of my time a week, unless Edward Kmett decides to release a new version of one of his packages.

This constant arguing around PVP upper bounds truly baffles me, because every discussion I've seen of it seems to completely disregard the fact that there's an improved toolchain around for which all of the PVP upper bound arguments are simply null and void. And let me clarify that statement: I'm not saying Stackage answers the PVP upper bound question. I'm saying that- for the vast majority of users- Stackage makes the answer to the question irrelevant. If you are using Stackage, it makes not one bit of difference to you whether a package has upper bounds or not.

And for the record, Stackage isn't the only solution to the problem that makes the PVP upper bound question irrelevant. Having cabal-install automatically determine upper bounds based on upload dates is entirely possible. I in fact already implemented such a system, and sent it for review to two of the staunchest PVP-upper-bounds advocates I interact with. I didn't actually receive any concrete feedback.

So that brings me back to my point: why are we constantly arguing about this issue which clearly has good arguments on both sides, when we could instead just upgrade our tooling and do away with the problem?

But surely upper bounds do affect some users, right? For one, it affects the people doing curation itself (that's me). I can tell you without any doubt that PVP upper bounds makes my life more difficult during curation. I've figured out ways to work around it, so I don't feel like trying to convince people to change their opinions. It also affects people who aren't using Stackage or some other improved tooling. And my question to those people is: why not?

I'd like to close by addressing the idea that the PVP is "a solution." Obviously that's a vague statement, because we have to define "the problem." So I'll define the problem as: someone types cabal install foo and it doesn't install. Let me count the ways that PVP upper bounds fail to completely solve this problem:

  1. The newest release of foo may have a bug in it, and cabal has no way of knowing it.
  2. One of the dependencies of foo may have a bug in it, and for whatever reason cabal chooses that version.
  3. foo doesn't include PVP upper bounds and a new version of a dependency breaks it. (See comment below if you don't like this point.)
  4. Some of the dependencies of foo don't include PVP upper bounds, and a new version of the transitive dependencies break things.
  5. There's a semantic change in a point release which causes tests to fail. (You do test your environments before using them, right? Because Stackage does.)
  6. I've been really good and included PVP upper bounds, and only depended on packages that include PVP upper bounds. But I slipped up and had a mistake in a cabal file once. Now cabal chooses an invalid build plan.
  7. All of the truly legitimate reasons why the build may fail: no version of the package was ever buildable, no version of the package was ever compatible with your version of GHC or OS, it requires something installed system wide that you don't have, etc.

That's not fair, point (3) says that the policy doesn't help if you don't follow it, that's a catch 22! Nope, that's exactly my point. A policy on its own does not enforce anything. A tooling solution can enforce invariants. Claiming that the PVP will simply solve dependency problems is built around the idea of universal compliance, lack of mistakes, historical compliance, and the PVP itself covering all possible build issues. None of these claims hold up in the real world.

To go comically over the top: assuming the PVP will solve dependency problems is hoping to live in a world without sin. We must accept the PVP into our hearts. If we have a build problem, we must have faith that it is because we did not trust the PVP truly enough. The sin is not with the cabal dependency solver, it is with ourselves. If we ever strayed from the path of the PVP, we must repent of our evil ways, and return unto the PVP, for the PVP is good. I'm a religious man. My religion just happens to not be the PVP.

I'm not claiming that Stackage solves every single reason why a build fails. The points under (7), for example, are not addressed. However, maybe of the common problems people face- and, I'd argue, the vast majority of issues that confuse and plague users- are addressed by simply moving over to Stackage.

If you haven't already, I highly recommend you give Stackage a try today.

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