New cabal-install release (and schedule) needed

[Johan Tibell]

On Mon, Aug 27, 2012 at 2:09 PM, Andres Löh <andres at well-typed.com> wrote:
>> I don't think it is. The release schedule is the important part for me.
>
> I'm not a huge fan of quarterly release schedules. They hardly leave
> you any time to actually do anything. I'd much rather have a release
> schedule that's predictably in sync with GHC releases, to prevent lags
> as we had prior to the cabal-install-0.14 release. Regarding the need
> for a release of 0.16 very soon, I completely agree.

Here's the list of Cabal library releases for the last few years,
including their release date:

1.14.0.0 Thu Feb  2 2012
1.12.0.0 Tue Jan 31 2012
1.10.2.0 Sat Jun 18 2011
1.10.1.0 Thu Mar  3 2011
1.10.0.0 Tue Nov 16 2010
1.8.0.6 Tue Jun 15 2010
1.8.0.4 Wed Mar 31 2010
1.8.0.2 Wed Dec 16 2009
1.6.0.3 Thu Apr  9 2009

and for cabal-install

0.14.0 Tue Apr 17 15:47:57 UTC 2012
0.10.2 Wed Mar 9 00:14:20 UTC 2011
0.10.0 Thu Mar 3 15:02:44 UTC 2011
0.8.2 Wed Mar 31 12:11:59 UTC 2010
0.8.0 Sun Dec 20 00:50:38 UTC 2009
0.6.4 Sat Nov 28 03:54:30 UTC 2009
0.6.2 Thu Feb 19 15:30:33 UTC 2009

I think we need more frequent releases for two reasons:

 * It give people and incentive do stuff. Trying to improve cabal in
order to improve your own use of it, knowing that it will take 6+
months to be able to make use of the improvement isn't very
motivating.

 * We need to fix bugs. Waiting 6 months for a bug fix is not OK. For
example, there were a couple of regressions in the last release (i.e.
profiling code not building correctly due to GHC not being passed the
right arguments) that have been fixed but not released. Generally I'd
expect any bug that affects a larger number of users to cause another
release no more than a week or two after it has been fixed.

-- Johan