[GHC-Releases] GHC 9.10 release schedule and core library status

[Julian Ospald]

Hi,

I'm unsure what the process here is. Do you expect every boot library 
maintainer to follow GHC issue tracker and comment there? Or to open a 
PR against ghc repo? I definitely won't do the latter as an unpaid 
volunteer (I don't want to deal with GHC MRs and CI).

For 'filepath' and 'unix' (and 'os-string', which is to become a boot 
package) I'd prefer if you open issues on each issue tracker. If that is 
too cumbersome, please link me to the place where I'm supposed to 
comment and give me a deadline.

'filepath' just had a severe bug fixed that may need to be backported.

Thanks,
Julian

On 1/23/24 01:44, Hécate via Libraries wrote:
> Hi Ben!
> 
> For the 9.10 release I would like to cut the accompanying Haddock 
> release from the GHC tree.
> 
> Cool features will have to wait for 9.12, so that that the new team can 
> get acquainted with the code base and the bugs.
> 
> Thank you for reaching out.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Hécate
> 
> Le 22/01/2024 à 17:00, Ben Gamari a écrit :
>> Hi all,
>>
>> First, apologies for the silence regarding the 9.10 fork; I was hoping
>> to improve our communications with boot library authors in the run-up to
>> GHC 9.10 but illness unfortunately took me largely out of commission for
>> a first few weeks of the year. Happily, things are looking rosier now.
>>
>> Having had a chance to look at the 9.10 branch and the release goals, I
>> am planning to cut the fork for GHC 9.10 around a month from today, on
>> 23 Februrary 2024. This leaves around a month of time to merge the
>> `ghc-internals` split and a few of the other bits of work that remain
>> outstanding. We anticipate the first alpha release will come a week
>> after the fork (see the Milestone [1] for further details).
>>
>> How does this sound to you?
>>
>> For organizational purposes, it would be helpful if we designated a
>> coordinating maintainer for each of our boot packagers for the 9.10 
>> release.
>> My understanding is that our boot libraries have the following primary
>> maintainers but don't hesitate to let me know if you believe this to be
>> incorrect:
>>
>> | Package         | Maintainer                 |
>> | --------------- | -------------------------- |
>> | Cabal           | Mikolaj Konarski           |
>> | Win32           | Tamar Christina            |
>> | array           | (orphaned)                 |
>> | binary          | Lennart Kolmodin?          |
>> | bytestring      | Andrew Lelechanko          |
>> | containers      | David Feuer                |
>> | deepseq         | Melanie Phoenix            |
>> | directory       | Phil Rufflewind            |
>> | exceptions      | Ryan Scott                 |
>> | filepath        | Julian Ospald              |
>> | haddock         | Hecate                     |
>> | haskeline       | Judah Jacobson             |
>> | hpc             | David Binder               |
>> | mtl             | Emily Pillmore             |
>> | parsec          | Oleg Grenrus               |
>> | process         | Michael Snoyman            |
>> | stm             | Simon Marlow               |
>> | terminfo        | Judah Jacobson             |
>> | text            | Andrew Lelechanko          |
>> | time            | Ashley Yakeley             |
>> | transformers    | Ross Paterson              |
>> | unix            | Julian Ospald              |
>>
>> It would be great if each maintainer could let me know what they would
>> like to do for the 9.10 release. In general we would love to have the
>> set of boot libraries pinned down at least in version by the second
>> alpha, which we are planning for the second week of March 2024. Does
>> this sound reasonable?
>>
>> As always, I would encourage core library maintainers to be conservative
>> in their plans for a GHC release and avoid introducing major features or
>> refactorings in their release. Such changes both add risk to the release
>> schedule and complicate the users' migration paths; consequently, they
>> are ideally best held for releases asynchronous to the GHC release
>> process.
>>
>> Thanks again for all of your work!
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> - Ben
>>
>>
>> [1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/milestones/380#tab-issues
>