ANNOUNCE: Cabal 1.2.0 released

[Duncan Coutts]

On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 20:32 +0200, Thomas Schilling wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-09-06 at 21:00 +0400, Bulat Ziganshin wrote:
> > i suggest you to forward announce into main haskell maillist too
> > 
> > major release of such important library is definitely news interesting
> > for many haskellers

> Well, I think I should have been a little clearer about the status of
> this release.  Let me clarify.
> 
> Earlier releases were preceded by release candidates before the .0
> release.  However, we changed it this time so that .0 basically is the
> release candidate and .1 will then be the first stable release.
> Therefore, we decided to post only to the developer mailing lists, so
> that the first release to the wider public (1.2.1) will, hopefully, have
> most issues resolved.

The corollary to that of course is a request to everyone to please test
the new release and see if your most important pet Cabal bugs have been
fixed or if there are any regressions.

You can get a reasonably accurate view of what bugs we know about from
our bug tracker:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/hackage/

So if it's not listed there, assume we do not know about it and please
report it. We can't promise to fix everything but we can at least not
forget stuff and try and prioritise things for future point releases.

This is also the opportunity for package developers to try out the new
configurations feature before ghc-6.8 comes out and fix to up any
Setup.lhs scripts (or get rid of them if possible).

Note that, at the moment hackage probably will not accept packages using
configurations since it will not be able to parse them. We'll need to
update the cabal lib on hackage. There's also an interesting problem for
hackage clients like cabal-install since they will not be able to
parse .cabal files that use configurations until they are updated. One
solution is for hackage to bump the index format, to 01-index.tar.gz. So
the 00-index.tar.gz would continue to have packages that do not use
configurations and the 01-index.tar.gz would have all packages including
newer ones using configurations syntax. So older clients would be
blissfully unaware and new clients could look for the new index file.

Duncan