Cabal developers meeting of the 12/10/2023

[Theophile Hécate Choutri]

Hi everyone, here are the minutes of today's meeting.
Due to the poor quality of the Jitsi service at the time, the meeting was
held on Google Meet.

## Cabal 3.10.2.0 status

Distribution blockers:
  * Windows paths corrupted in CI ->
https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/pull/127
    * error:
https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/pull/127#issuecomment-1742107642 (
https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/actions/runs/6371387038/job/17293285342#step:3:15214
)
    * Julian has some steps to bypass this blocker. In any case we need
more in-house expertise.
  * No i386 Alpine bindists produced anymore since last release
    * We should deprioritise i386 as GHC is far from being reliable on this
platform, and statically linking GHC doesn't work.

## Current Affairs

### Hooks build type
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9292 now has a design document that
you can read:
https://github.com/well-typed/hooks-build-type/blob/main/design.md.
An accompanying survey is also available at
https://github.com/well-typed/hooks-build-type/blob/main/survey.md that
justifies the decisions.

Artem: would it be possible to post it on Discourse / Cafe?
Hécate: It will be considered, and will be done.

### Inclusion of project unit identifier in store paths and compiler ABI
tag  in package hashes

Simon Hengel (_sol_) opened two PRs of interest:

* [Include the compiler ABI tag in nix-style package hashes #9325](
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9325)
* [Include the GHC "Project Unit Id" in the cabal store path #9326](
https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9326)

To fix https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8114

Ben is not very convinced of this design, because it hampers reinstallable
GHC from being implementable. You'd want to track GHC like any other build
tool, and not have it intervene in distinguishing store items.

Gershom prefers inserting the disambiguation hash in the path, as it does
not lead to weird situations in terms of cohabitation.

### Improving Cabal docs

Can people look into: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9212 where a
volunteer is trying to improve the getting started section of the manual?
It's easy to make it worse. We need to have more eyeballs on it.
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