What do you do if a transitive dependency is broken?

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#1

In a situation where the maintainer is unavailable what do you do?

With direct dependencies, its possible to fork the dependency, create a fix and add your branch github details to the extra-deps in stack.yaml.

How do you do this if it’s not a direct dependency but a transitive dependency. I get an error about the dependencies conflicting if I try to add it to my stack.yaml extra-deps.
The error I get is:

The same package name is used in more than one local package or extra-deps.

Is this not possible? Or do you have to fork every dependency along the dependency chain to point to the new dependency repository?

#2

If you’re willing to use cabal, it does allow you to patch indirect dependencies (for example).

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#3

(Specifically, I think validation-selective is an indirect dependency.)

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#4

Also, is there a specific package in question? If so could you say what it is? Maybe we can just get it fixed.

#5

Maybe you could share your stack.yaml? That might also help us understand what your specific problem is.

#6

Thanks!! So i imagine this isn’t supported by stack?

But glad it’s possible atleast. Maybe we switch soon.

#7

This was a more general question this time.

But an example dependency I’m waiting on is the postgres-options dependency which is a dependency of tmp-postgres which I depend on. There’s already a PR that fixes the issues with postgres-option, so It would have been nice to just point to that PR branch already.

#8

Nothing very fancy in this case. So there’s nothing unique in the stack.yml at the moment.

#9

stack.yaml is the place to pin all transitive dependencies. Can you share your stack.yaml? That error looks like you already have the dependency you’re trying to pin mentioned in extra-deps.

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