Cabal 1.24 and 1.26 status update

[Mikhail Glushenkov]

Hi *,

A short update on the current status of the 1.24 branch and plans for the
future. Given that the GHC 8 final release is fast approaching, I've decided to
create the 1.24 branch before the GHC 8 RC3 has been released. This means that
some of the Cabal features initially planned for 1.24 (see [1]) will
unfortunately have to be postponed until 1.26.

These features are:

https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2540 - platform libraries
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2522 - globstar globbing

However, we've decided to do another (small) feature release of cabal-install
off the 1.24 branch a month or two after the release of cabal-install
1.24.0.0. Therefore the following patches, which do not touch Cabal library
code, will make it into the 1.24.1.0 release of cabal-install:

https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2916 - space leak in solver
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2914 - space leak in solver
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2774 - gen-bounds command
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/2882 - status command

Also, cabal-install 1.24.1.0 will include an alpha version of Duncan's
nix-local-build work, which is currently in the process of being merged. This is
intended as a technical preview.

Looking further forward, the 1.26 release is currently planned for August 2016.


[1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.cabal.devel/10478