3.12.1.0 — a minor release of Cabal and friends

[ulysses4ever]

The 3.12.1.0 release of Cabal and related packages, including cabal-install, is supposed to follow a (yet to be released) major release of Cabal and Cabal-syntax -- 3.12.0.0. Below is a checklist for the release taken from the wiki page on releasing. /cc @Mikolaj @ffaf1 But first and foremost:

• Release 3.12.0.0. See: Release checklist for GHC 9.10 #9729
  • One optional point that wasn't done there is: extending CI for GHC 9.10; I started this work in #9914 but got a little stuck: I need more time to handle it
• check if any more backports are needed for 3.12.1.0; current plans:
  • update base bounds for desupported ghc 8.2 (backport #9964) #9980
  • Render project configs as clean list in provenance message #9985
  • together with @Kleidukos we will go through the list of PRs merged into master since March, and see if anything is worth of backports to 3.12 but didn't make it (We use this search query.)
    • As discussed on Matrix, backports should be limited to three things: bugfixes, documentation, CI (except bootstrap). Rationale: it's a slow process, and we have a growing demand for a cabal-install that can work with Cabal-3.12.

When ticking out the boxes below, please, try to add links to respective PRs.

A.1 Before the release

• Pre-flight Checks
• Changelog generation
• Bump version numbers
• Upload release candidates
• Publish artifacts
• Tweak things as needed, merge patches to fix regressions
• Re-upload the candidates on Hackage based on the latest tag, and publish them

A.2 After the release

• prepare a list of contributors for the release, e.g., git log --use-mailmap --pretty=format:%an Cabal-v3.6.1.0...Cabal-v3.8.1.0 | sort -u and don't forget to mention "reviewers, QA testers, devops and others"
• advertise on discourse, haskell-cafe and cabal-devel (how to install using ghcup (ghcup install cabal --url https://downloads.haskell.org/~cabal/cabal-install-3.8.1.0-rc1/cabal-install-3.8.1.0-x86_64-linux-deb10.tar.xz 3.8.1.0), changelogs, how great our community is and how we love and cherish collaborators, known important bugs and that if anybody is keen to see a particular bug go before 3.8.1.0, the window is now very narrow but we will try to help the interested person squash the bug)
• ask kind souls to cross-post to Discord, cabal-devel mailing list, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, copy the links to #hackage so that others can upvote
• Move the tickets that haven't made it to the release to the next one.
• party 🥳

[ulysses4ever]

I added another checkbox in the very beginning: to release 3.12.0.0 because as Mikolaj suggests on Matrix, a lot is blocked on some of it.

[ulysses4ever]

Possible blocker:

• Regression: local repository file+noindex ignores noindex part #9891

[ulysses4ever]

Added a reference to #9729 by the "Release 3.12.0.0" todo.

[ulysses4ever]

In the issue description above, I added a suggestion to add links to respective PRs when ticking out the checkboxes.

[ulysses4ever]

I added another point that goes before the main list of steps: to check if any more backports are needed for 3.12.1.0.

[ulysses4ever]

Seems like two PR's are worth of backporting:

• update base bounds for desupported ghc 8.2 (backport #9964) #9980 (already a backport PR; I'm working on landing this now)
• Render project configs as clean list in provenance message #9985 (not merged into master yet, needs a review; I plan to do it as soon as I'm done with the first one)

[Mikolaj]

Sounds good. @ffaf1, @Kleidukos?

[phadej]

Is there an ETA when release will happen? The lack of GHC-9.10 compatible cabal-install is (softly) blocking the work on adding support for GHC-9.10

[ulysses4ever]

There's no ETA that I know of but thank you for signaling this concern: this will help us to prioritize things.

[ulysses4ever]

We are going through backports slowly. As discussed on Matrix, backports will have to be limited to three things: bugfixes, documentation, CI (except bootstrap). Rationale: it's a slow process, and we have a growing demand for a cabal-install that can work with Cabal-3.12.

[Bodigrim]

How is it going? There is always going to be one more backport to do, but are they that critical?

[ulysses4ever]

There were some critical CI fixes that we were backporting over last week. We want to have one last pass over the list of actual bugfixes, and then get to actually do the release. We still don't have a tentative date. All who's in need of a newer cabal-install (e.g. because they use Custom setups), should consider using the prerelease in the meantime: https://discourse.haskell.org/t/ann-cabal-3-12-0-0-released/9504#how-to-get-the-cabal-install-pre-release-3

One issue that we potentially want to be resolved, fixed on master and backported is #9917 and it's in very early stages...

[Bodigrim]

One issue that we potentially want to be resolved, fixed on master and backported is #9917 and it's in very early stages...

You might want to change things in future so that it does not happen again in time for GHC 9.12, but #9917 per se would be immediately resolved by releasing cabal-install-3.12.

There were some critical CI fixes that we were backporting over last week.

But CI fixes are not a part of cabal-install package anyway, how do they happen to be critical?

[ulysses4ever]

But CI fixes are not a part of cabal-install package anyway, how do they happen to be critical?

Well we consider green CI a prerequisite for a release.

You might want to change things in future so that it does not happen again in time for GHC 9.12, but #9917 per se would be immediately resolved by releasing cabal-install-3.12.

We want to change this before 3.12 so that when Cabal-3.14 is release we don'tget into the same trouble.

[Bodigrim]

My opinion that it's important to have a release of cabal-install within a few weeks after a respective GHC release, and delaying it even if for a noble cause does more harm than good to the state of ecosystem. A guidance for timeline would be much appreciated.

[Mikolaj]

@ulysses4ever: How about timeboxing #9917? Once all other backports are merged, give it 2 more days? (CC @andreasabel)

[ulysses4ever]

Sounds good to me.

[andreasabel]

I do not have time to work on #9917 now, emitting where and how to emit the warning needs more understanding of the code base. I am paid to work on Agda and I need a working Haskell infrastructure, but digging so deep into Cabal is somewhat out of scope. But also, there seems to be no one who is paid to do bugfixing work on Cabal, is that right? From our meetings, I get the impression that all is volunteer work, and @Mikolaj has a part-time job to orchestrate this work...

[Mikolaj]

@andreasabel: I can't speak for others (AFAIK, some other companies are permitting or encouraging their employees to contribute to cabal) but that's about right regarding my humble person and the key point is we crucially depend on contributions from cabal users. But I did not suggest you fix the problem. I CCd you, because you are an interested party and you did cabal a favour by coordinating this particular issue, so you should be aware of the constraints as they emerge. As soon as there's consensus about the issue, maybe we could advertise it to find an implementer?

[ulysses4ever]

Discussion over at benz0li/ghc-musl#8 (comment) reminded me that it'd be great to update cabal-install so that it builds with GHC 9.10 before the 3.12.1.0 release. So #9914, which is currently stuck with some test failures due to 9.10.

[ulysses4ever]

#9914 (support for GHC 9.10) has landed but its backport to 3.12 currently has some test failures:

• CI: add GHC 9.10 (backport #9914) #10058

[Mikolaj]

I've added some more info in the backport, but now somebody has to do the actual work.

[ulysses4ever]

We landed CI update for GHC 9.10 on the 3.12 branch (#10058). The next step is to walk briskly through the remaining backport candidates and start the release process.