Changing the type signature to relax/strengthen pre or post conditions is a fundamental change though. I would expect it to break call sites. That's a feature!
Strengthening postconditions and relaxing preconditions is harmless in theory, so it should be harmless in practice.
Haskell gets in the way by facilitating clashes of incompatible types: there are reasons to make breaking changes to type signatures that in more deliberately designed languages might remain unaltered or compatible, without breaking call sites.
> If function f returns b or nothing/error, and is then improved to return b always, client code that calls f should not require changes or become invalid, except perhaps for a dead code warning on the parts that deal with the now impossible case of a missing result from f.
You can achieve this by not changing the type and keeping the result as Maybe b. Dead code to handle `Nothing`, no harm done.
However, you clarify you don't want this because:
> Changing the type signature (which, by the way, could be at least in easy cases implicitly deduced by the compiler rather than edited by hand) allows new client code to assume that the result is present.
But this cuts both ways. If the old call site can assume there may be errors (even though the new type "b" doesn't specify them) then the new call site cannot assume there are no errors (what works for old must work for new).
