Cabal developers meeting of the 24/11/2023

[Theophile Hécate Choutri]

## Current affairs

- Andrea: The issue with GHC 9.6, -fplugin and cabal register seems to be
affecting many users, including stack and rules_haskell:
https://discourse.haskell.org/t/ghcs-fplugin-any-changes-between-9-4-7-and-9-6-2/7656/4
.
We had an issue (https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9375) opened last
month and we merged a fix (https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9384)
about three weeks ago. I am not expecting the release gods to get their
hands dirty again but could we make a minor release for this patch?
  - Hécate: No problem for a 3.10.3.0 patch release, we need to ship
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9459 anyway

- Hécate: No plan for patch releases for 3.8 and 3.6.

- Andrea: [#9374](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9374) (Guard
PackageInfo behind cabal-version: 3.10) we need to make a decision about
what to do. Further discussion is at
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9331.

  - Mikołaj has a plan:
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9331#issuecomment-1792219043
- Javier: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9462 (`default-constraints`
proposal): I'd like to have a first discussion on whether the proposal is
considered beneficial or not, and discuss alternatives to it.
  - `package-constraints` seems to be a more fitting name
  - An RFC for the design for the PR will be opened

## Review needed

- Andrea: I had https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9123 opened for a
while, blocked on a CI failure on Windows. Can we get someone with Windows
experience to look at the failure (
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/actions/runs/6480591351/job/17596418675#step:18:1663
)?
  - No clear resolution for this problem at this time
  - Javier can't in fact run the test-suite in Windows on this branch.

- Andrea: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9320 on standalone foreign
libs. I am happy to extend the documentation but we need to know what we
want to say.
  - Yvan would be happy to help on that :)

- Yvan: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9159, it's mainly code
refactoring, Andrea pair-programmed with me on this one.

- Yvan: Stuck with a bug on https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9160,
it's a low-hanging fruit to improve `cabal-install` output.
  - Hécate: Looks like it's a matter of changing hashes?
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/actions/runs/6783137983/job/18436767543?pr=9160#step:15:18

  - Yvan: Not only
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9160#issuecomment-1798232254

- Rodrigo: Almost done with https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9464:
reworks a bit --enable-coverage and "re-fixes" #5213, #4798 and will fix
#6440.

- Rodrigo: Did this fix on a whim
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9448. I think this happens once in
a while and I've put forward a pragmatic fix. I don't understand what other
situation can trigger this error.

## Food for thoughts

- Andrea: I have played a bit with the lexer to add tokens for whitespace
and comments (maybe a humble step towards exact-printing but I won't make
such a claim). While doing that I noticed the token `TokFieldLine` never
gets emitted by the lexer (I tested this on the whole Hackage). I am not
very well versed in this, does anybody have a clue?
  - Hécate: It might actually be impossible for the Lexer to emit this
token, due to overlap with other things.
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