October 2023 - cabal-devel

Cabal developers meeting of the 26/10/2023
by Theophile Hécate Choutri 27 Oct '23

27 Oct '23

## Current Affairs (tickets and PRs of interests) * Use response files for ghc invocations #9367: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9367 * PackageInfo functionality is not guarded behind cabal-version. #9331 : https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9331 * We have to be more careful in the future to guard new functionality behind the cabal-version field of the file format. * Terminology: Internal libraries are out, sublibraries are in! This is the terminology that was already used in several blog posts, and as such we must unify the vocabulary: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9371 * The exact-print parser topic has been raised from the dead once again, and the situation is that many people seem to be interested in pursuing experiments that cannot be realistically included in the cabal parsing infrastructure. Due to the extreme sensitivity of the subject, a proposal will have to go through the Technical Working Group before it's approved, so that development can be smoother. * lib:Cabal 3.10.2.1 has been released, with relaxed restrictions on the contents of the c-sources stanza in the cabal file format. ## Summer of Code 2023 Suganya has landed the last PR to convert cabal errors to error codes. Further documentation work is needed but the main goal has been reached. Congratulations Suganya! ## Food for thought Hécate: Bodigrim suggests that 3.10 could be kept on life support in order to provide interfaces that we are trying to get rid of (namely v1- commands, Custom setups, etc). See original comment: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9107#issuecomment-1773927473 *Conclusion: It's been decided that this would be too burdensome, and we lack the resources to do such a thing.*

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Cabal developers meeting of the 26/10/2023 agenda and minutes
by Theophile Hécate Choutri 22 Oct '23

22 Oct '23

Hi everyone, in advance here are the minutes of our bi-monthly meeting: https://hackmd.io/@Hecate/HJI186-fa/edit I urge everyone to add their topic of interest, if only to go back to the topics that we discussed during the previous meeting, like the project unit ID in the path, the hooks proposal, etc. See you next week, Hécate

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Cabal developers meeting of the 12/10/2023
by Theophile Hécate Choutri 13 Oct '23

13 Oct '23

Hi everyone, here are the minutes of today's meeting. Due to the poor quality of the Jitsi service at the time, the meeting was held on Google Meet. ## Cabal 3.10.2.0 status Distribution blockers: * Windows paths corrupted in CI -> https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/pull/127 * error: https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/pull/127#issuecomment-1742107642 ( https://github.com/haskell/ghcup-metadata/actions/runs/6371387038/job/17293… ) * Julian has some steps to bypass this blocker. In any case we need more in-house expertise. * No i386 Alpine bindists produced anymore since last release * We should deprioritise i386 as GHC is far from being reliable on this platform, and statically linking GHC doesn't work. ## Current Affairs ### Hooks build type https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9292 now has a design document that you can read: https://github.com/well-typed/hooks-build-type/blob/main/design.md. An accompanying survey is also available at https://github.com/well-typed/hooks-build-type/blob/main/survey.md that justifies the decisions. Artem: would it be possible to post it on Discourse / Cafe? Hécate: It will be considered, and will be done. ### Inclusion of project unit identifier in store paths and compiler ABI tag in package hashes Simon Hengel (_sol_) opened two PRs of interest: * [Include the compiler ABI tag in nix-style package hashes #9325]( https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9325) * [Include the GHC "Project Unit Id" in the cabal store path #9326]( https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9326) To fix https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/8114 Ben is not very convinced of this design, because it hampers reinstallable GHC from being implementable. You'd want to track GHC like any other build tool, and not have it intervene in distinguishing store items. Gershom prefers inserting the disambiguation hash in the path, as it does not lead to weird situations in terms of cohabitation. ### Improving Cabal docs Can people look into: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9212 where a volunteer is trying to improve the getting started section of the manual? It's easy to make it worse. We need to have more eyeballs on it.

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