Release plans

[Duncan Coutts]

On Sun, 2008-03-09 at 23:32 +0000, Neil Mitchell wrote:
> Hi
> 
> >  First, we intend to release the next version of GHC from the current
> >  stable branch, 6.8.3, around the end of May 2008. This will probably be
> >  the last release from this branch.
> 
> Is it possible to include the cabal-install tool with this release, in
> the Windows installer?
> 
> The cabal-install tool provides very useful functionality, and is
> currently rather tricky to install. If cabal-install was already
> installed, then installing cabal-install would be trivial (note how
> cabal-install causes a mental black hole).

Note that cabal-install requires the yet-unreleased Cabal-1.4.x and that
GHC-6.8.3 will come with a release from the Cabal-1.2.x branch to
preserve API compatibility with the earlier GHC-6.8.x releases.

You could still have a cabal-install binary in the Windows installer and
not include the Cabal-1.4.x library that you built it against.
Alternatively it'd be possible to include Cabal-1.4.x too and have it
not exposed by default. That'd enable cabal-install to use it for any
packages that use a custom Setup.hs without it being picked up by
default by ghc --make or ghci.

cabal-install will become easier to install anyway once we make an
official release of it and Cabal-1.4.

If that's still too tricky for people we could make a single tarball
that bundles Cabal-1.4, zlib, HTTP and cabal-install but installs only
the cabal-install binary.

Duncan