Tony Morris

It doesn't allow addition or removal of deps. It can only change the allowable version range, and such changes should only be made to restrict non-working plans or allow actually-working plans.

This isn't true. For example, addition of custom-setup stanzas has been allowed, and changes the build artifact significantly.

No. It changes the depa of the setup script, not the code built. Also this was allowed to _maintain_ behavior between cabal lib versions, and keep things building.

This is not true, you can easily add a dep this way. More importantly, because of how Cabal works, custom setup deps can force tools into different build executions. I've been in the trenches dealing with the bugs.

Revisions were forced on us with a claim that they would only be used for dep ranges because it was the only way to fix the dep solver. There were much simpler dep solver solutions available, and revisions are used for much more now.

without the setup-stanza fix a huge chunk of cabal packages would have broken with new cabal install libs for no good reason. this is a weird thing to be mad about.

I'm not sure why you've decided to inject emotion in here, this is a technical discussion. I'm stating quite objectively that the revision system can be used to change build artifact, making it contradicts original goals.

your mad about it