New cabal-install release (and schedule) needed

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2012-08-26 at 22:27 -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:
> We need to publish a new cabal-install 0.16 release shortly, ideally before
> GHC 7.6.1 and the next Haskell Platform come out.
> 
> At the very least, there's a newish incompatibility between GHC 7.6 and
> cabal-install that causes all -Werror builds to fail because cabal-install
> uses a deprecated package flag. This was fixed back in May, but that needs
> to actually go out into the wild.
> 
> Stepping back, I'd also like to suggest that we move to a quarterly release
> cycle on a simple, widely used model. A major goal here is to get code into
> people's hands on a predictable schedule.
> 
> We maintain two branches, stable and master. Master freezes a month before
> a release, with only bugfixes and typo fixes going in. At release time, the
> stable branch opens (in case any emergency fixes are needed), and master
> opens up for normal development again.
> 
> Johan and I are happy to do the work to manage these cycles.

> I suggest that we start the first cycle with a target release date of the
> end of September, then go four months to the next one (after all, it would
> be unrealistic to pretend that we might do a release at the end of
> December).
> 
> Does this sound reasonable?

I think help with managing the stable branch and making releases would
be very helpful indeed.

I did used to do more frequent releases but it's a time consuming task.
I'd certainly prefer to spend time on patch review, cleaning up old code
and adding new features.

BTW, I'm no longer on honeymoon and I've nearly finished rewriting the
bytestring I/O layer so I hope to have a bit more time for cabal patch
review and hacking.

Duncan