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[BebeSparkelSparkel]

Cabal Gild is a package management tool and many packages have support windows greater than the last three versions of ghc. This means that they cannot use cabal-gild in their ci because cabal install cabal-gild will install a different versions across the ci workflows.

The cabal flag --constraint="cabal-gild < ... could be used but this is problematic because

• a lot of new useful features have been implemented recently that make cabal-gild usable and without those features users will not adopt cabal gild
• cabal-gild does not report failure if a pragma is not supported
• cabal-gild is not actually broken with older ghc version

The cabal flag --allow-older=base could be used but then there is the potential for ci builds to start failing because of build errors for cabal-gild.

• the user has to check if the cabal-gild is actually compatible with their ghc version
• even if cabal-gild does install, it does not mean that it is not broken

[tfausak]

This is related to #99, #78, #75, and #40.

There's no set of GHC versions that would support everyone. Any decision I make will exclude some people. The latest three major versions is typical of a lot of other tools, including all other packages that I maintain. If users want to compile Gild using an unsupported version of GHC, they can either use an older version of Gild or roll the dice with allow newer/older.

That being said, I would encourage users not to install Gild from source. I provide Linux, macOS, and Windows binaries for every release. I also maintain cabal-gild-setup-action for GitHub Actions.

[BebeSparkelSparkel]

I'm on OpenBSD so that probably skews my opinion. I understand your reasoning though.

[tfausak]

Note that OpenBSD is a tier 2 platform for GHC: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/platforms

Notably, GHC releases don't provide binaries for OpenBSD: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_9_10_1.html#binaries