Cabal package descriptions

[Isaac Jones]

"Simon Marlow" <simonmar at microsoft.com> writes:

> On 10 February 2005 16:18, Ross Paterson wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 03:33:48PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
>>> I more or less agree with all this, but it's too late to get any API
>>> changes into 6.4 now.  We might have to start thinking about
>>> backwards compatibility.
>> 
>> There's a dissonance between the need to ship GHC and the unfinished
>> state of Cabal.  Most of the interface is worked out, but there are a
>> few parts (not the parts currently used by GHC) that are experimental
>> and/or need fixing, and these have had very little user feedback.  I
>> think this will be a beta release for Cabal, and its interface will
>> need changing soon. What to do?  Independent releases of Cabal
>> updates?
>
> It's certainly possible to produce an updated version of Cabal later on,
> released independently of GHC.  However, that's a bit of a pain - if
> there are only a few minor interface changes to go in, I'm prepared to
> hold the GHC release until they're finished.

I'm still a bit worried; I suspect the Distribution.Make stuff is out
of date, and if we're under a freeze already then that should probably
go away.  setup sdist has bitrotted too, and I don't have a hugs test
suite yet.

The change I made to add preprocessors to UserHooks is pretty
important, IMO.

I can definitely release cabal separately; I have maintained an
independent tree, as you know, but there are obviously problems with
this.  Are we under a code freeze right now?  Can we get another
weekend to hack on it?

There's yet another problem that there is a Debian release coming up
and the version of cabal, hugs, and GHC that ends up in that is a big
deal.  Ideally, we could all release hugs, ghc, and cabal together,
safely before the Debian release, but I'm worried that this won't
happen.  Oh, and there was just a release at work too. meh.

So my annoying question is: how long can we hold off GHC and how soon
can we get Hugs :)

peace,

  isaac