3.12.1.0 — a minor release of Cabal and friends

[ulysses4ever]

The 3.12.1.0 release of Cabal and related packages, including cabal-install, is supposed to follow a (yet to be released) major release of Cabal and Cabal-syntax -- 3.12.0.0. Below is a checklist for the release taken from the wiki page on releasing. /cc @Mikolaj @ffaf1 But first and foremost:

• Release 3.12.0.0. See: Release checklist for GHC 9.10 #9729
  • One optional point that wasn't done there is: extending CI for GHC 9.10; I started this work in #9914 but got a little stuck: I need more time to handle it
• check if any more backports are needed for 3.12.1.0; current plans:
  • update base bounds for desupported ghc 8.2 (backport #9964) #9980
  • Render project configs as clean list in provenance message #9985
  • together with @Kleidukos we will go through the list of PRs merged into master since March, and see if anything is worth of backports to 3.12 but didn't make it (We use this search query.)
    • As discussed on Matrix, backports should be limited to three things: bugfixes, documentation, CI (except bootstrap). Rationale: it's a slow process, and we have a growing demand for a cabal-install that can work with Cabal-3.12.

When ticking out the boxes below, please, try to add links to respective PRs.

A.1 Before the release

• Pre-flight Checks Update licence list #9837 Bump dependencies and cabal-version #10082
• Changelog generation Changelogs for 3.12.1.0 #10124
• Bump version numbers Release 3.12.1.0 version bumps #10130
• Upload release candidates
• Publish artifacts
• Tweak things as needed, merge patches to fix regressions
• Re-upload the candidates on Hackage based on the latest tag, and publish them

A.2 After the release

• prepare a list of contributors for the release, e.g., git log --use-mailmap --pretty=format:%an Cabal-v3.6.1.0...Cabal-v3.8.1.0 | sort -u and don't forget to mention "reviewers, QA testers, devops and others"
• advertise on discourse, haskell-cafe and cabal-devel (how to install using ghcup, e.g. ghcup install cabal --url https://downloads.haskell.org/~cabal/cabal-install-3.8.1.0-rc1/cabal-install-3.8.1.0-x86_64-linux-deb10.tar.xz 3.8.1.0), changelogs, how great our community is and how we love and cherish collaborators, known important bugs and that if anybody is keen to see a particular bug go before 3.8.1.0, the window is now very narrow but we will try to help the interested person squash the bug)
• ask kind souls to cross-post to Discord, cabal-devel mailing list, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, copy the links to #hackage so that others can upvote
• Move the tickets that haven't made it to the release to the next one.
• party 🥳

[ulysses4ever]

I added another checkbox in the very beginning: to release 3.12.0.0 because as Mikolaj suggests on Matrix, a lot is blocked on some of it.

[ulysses4ever]

Possible blocker:

• Regression: local repository file+noindex ignores noindex part #9891

[ulysses4ever]

Added a reference to #9729 by the "Release 3.12.0.0" todo.

[ulysses4ever]

In the issue description above, I added a suggestion to add links to respective PRs when ticking out the checkboxes.

[ulysses4ever]

I added another point that goes before the main list of steps: to check if any more backports are needed for 3.12.1.0.

[ulysses4ever]

Seems like two PR's are worth of backporting:

• update base bounds for desupported ghc 8.2 (backport #9964) #9980 (already a backport PR; I'm working on landing this now)
• Render project configs as clean list in provenance message #9985 (not merged into master yet, needs a review; I plan to do it as soon as I'm done with the first one)

[Mikolaj]

Sounds good. @ffaf1, @Kleidukos?

[phadej]

Is there an ETA when release will happen? The lack of GHC-9.10 compatible cabal-install is (softly) blocking the work on adding support for GHC-9.10

[ulysses4ever]

There's no ETA that I know of but thank you for signaling this concern: this will help us to prioritize things.

[ulysses4ever]

We are going through backports slowly. As discussed on Matrix, backports will have to be limited to three things: bugfixes, documentation, CI (except bootstrap). Rationale: it's a slow process, and we have a growing demand for a cabal-install that can work with Cabal-3.12.