ANNOUNCE: GHC vesrion 6.4.2

[Simon Marlow]

Duncan Coutts wrote:
> On Wed, 2006-04-19 at 11:59 +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
>>On 19 April 2006 11:53, Christian Maeder wrote:
>>
>>
>>>Simon Marlow wrote:
>>>
>>>>Highlights in this release:
>>>>
>>>>  - Cabal has been upgraded to version 1.1.4.
>>>
>>>ghc-pkg lists
>>>
>>>     Cabal-1.0
>>>
>>>in the binary distribution
>>>
>>
>>http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/6.4.2/ghc-6.4.2-i386-unknown-linux.tar.b
>>z2
>>
>>Damn.  Well spotted.  I better re-roll the distributions.
> 
> 
> I'm concerned that there are many different versions of Cabal "1.1.4".
> The version that GHC 6.4.2 is now shipping is actually a very old
> version of Cabal 1.1.4.

Sorry, this is my fault: I just copied the CVS version of Cabal into 
6.4.2, and didn't bump the version on the mainline at the same time.

I've now bumped the mainline Cabal to 1.1.5, and I've tagged the version 
in 6.4.2 with the tag "shipped in GHC 6.4.2".  That version is circa Jan 
15, 2006.  I didn't copy Cabal/test in 6.4.2, so you will see some 
differences in there if you 'diff -cr', BTW.

So we have a deadzone between Jan 15 and now (last commit was Apr 11) 
where the mainline code claimed to be 1.1.4 and exposed various 
different APIs from the one shipped in 6.4.2.  But there were no actual 
releases of that code, fortunately.

The right way to proceed, I think, is to claim that the Cabal shipped in 
6.4.2 *is* 1.1.4.  Isaac; is that ok with you?  Can you put up a tarball 
of that tag for the Gentoo guys to use?

> Is there anything we can do for the next release of GHC/Cabal so that we
> don't end up with this mess?

Yes, I should coordinate with Isaac more closely next time, and we 
should coincide the GHC release with a Cabal release.  Either that, or 
GHC should be using a branch of the Cabal repository that corresponds to 
a recent stable version.

Cheers,
	Simon