cabal new-* commands awesomeness

[Ramakrishnan Muthukrishnan]

I just wanted to say, `cabal new-configure' and `new-install' commands
are awesome! Thanks to everyone who worked on it.

I have a few (unrelated) questions:

1. Will the `new' variants become the default? That will be nice!
2. I would like to contribute to Cabal project (especially after the
recent "discussions" on reddit and elsewhere on cabal vs stack etc..).
Are there "byte-sized" projects for people unfamiliar with Cabal source
code to look at? I saw that some bugs are tagged as "easy". Starting to
take a look.
3. Is there an irc channel where cabal devs hang out?

Thanks
-- 
  Ramakrishnan