Cabal-install and GHC

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Dear Cabal developers

As you know, we are almost ready to release GHC 6.12.  The Glorious Master Plan is that, because of your fantastic efforts with Cabal and Hackage, we are getting out of the libraries business, so that the 6.12 release will be "no batteries included"; Joe User will wait until the Haskell Platform release, which (on the 6-month timetable) would be in March 2010.  Thank you for this.

Although we've tested GHC 6.12 against all our own tests, we are reluctant to release without having tested it against Hackage.  Doing so might reveal serious bugs in GHC or (even worse) something wrong with the APIs that come with GHC, and we are not suppose to change APIs after release.  

Alas, to test GHC against Hackage we need a working cabal-install.  But cabal-install is currently broken, because of the recent changes to package ids, a change instigated by us but I think one you welcome.  
	
So in effect, we do still have a dependency on cabal-install.  As a result, the GHC 6.12 release is stalled, awaiting a working cabal-install.  We could go ahead and release, but we want people to test the release, and they are unlikely to do so without cabal-install. So there doesn't seem much point. So:

	Could you [I'm afraid this means you, Duncan] give us a *date* for 
      the new cabal-install, so that we can in turn tell our users 
      what to expect?

I'm certainly not expecting you to drop everything to do this.  Even if you say "Christmas" I'm sure we'll find a way to live with it, by staying with a Release Candidate for 6.12.  [Presumably it must be done way before the Haskell Platform release, so that people can test the HP itself.]  Regardless, it really would help our planning to know.
	
Many thanks

Simon