Cabal developers meeting of the 28/09/2023

[Theophile Hécate Choutri]

Hi everyone, here are the minutes of today's meeting:

## 3.10.2.0 Release

The release has been cut and we will dogfood it for a short while. The
binaries are uploaded at
https://downloads.haskell.org/~cabal/Cabal-3.10.2.0/ and are being
integrated into ghcup.

An official announcement will be sent on October 9th, along with the GHC
9.8 release.  You are encouraged to try it out. Each archive contains a
binary and the plan file generated by the build system.

## Bad paths on Windows

https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9253 has been merged, although
short of replacing FilePath with OsPath, there will always be the
possibility of other problems.

## Setup.hs

The effort to give a better alternative to custom Setup.hs is reviving. The
problematic generality of the current mechanism is the main source of pain.
This produces much complexity (as in "it is hard to determine outputs from
known inputs").

## Misc

Hécate: It would be nice to take some time and think about how GHC and
cabal have evolved during the last decades, and how with the consolidation
of the ecosystem, different boundaries could be drawn. Some code paths and
concerns could migrate from one tool to the other.

Ben: We have a cabal specification; I wish we'd kept that up to date; I
think that would define the interface between cabal & ghc and other
implementations.
Gershom: Code as spec would be a good solution.

Hécate will probably spend some time on refitting the dump-decls tool made
for GHC release engineering to something more standalone (perhaps
integrated in cabal-install?)
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