May 2023 - cabal-devel

cabal-dev meeting schedule
by Francesco Ariis 18 May '23

18 May '23

Hello everyone, at today cabal-dev meeting we talked about the proposal of shifting the fortnightly dev meeting by _one week_ [1], to accommodate more people (namely, Emily). Question: - would anyone else be affected (more likely/unlikely to join the meeting) with this date change? [1] so 25 May, 8 June, etc. instead of 18 may, 1 June, 15 June, etc.

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Data constructor of VersionIntervals not exported
by Daniel Trstenjak 16 May '23

16 May '23

Hi, I'm trying to update my tool cabal-bounds[1] to the newest version of the Cabal library. My tool needs to convert a [VersionInterval] into a VersionRange, which currently doesn't seem to be possible, because the data constructor of VersionIntervals isn't exported from Distribution.Types.VersionInterval. Best regards, Daniel Trstenjak [1] https://github.com/dan-t/cabal-bounds

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Code Review in Cabal Project
by Artem Pelenitsyn 08 May '23

08 May '23

Dear Cabal team, I have a couple points on the multiple components PR (https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/8726) drama. I didn't want to spend everyone's time during the meeting, and you can decide if you want to hear more about it now. The whole discussion on the meeting (with one exception) sounded to me like we're scolding Francesco (@fgaz). I feel bad because of that. Hence my email. By the way, one exception imo is Mikolaj saying that the whole story is his responsibility too. Thank you Mikolaj! I should say that me commenting on red CI probably added to the heat that was already there, and therefore it's also my responsibility. I'm sorry that the contributor got frustrated. That said, I want to say a big THANK YOU to Francesco. You left high-quality feedback, that myself (and I think others) can learn from. I personally lack the kind of expertise that you applied when doing this review. Please, do this more often! (time permitting, of course) People keep asking (1) why this happened (contributor throwing hands in the air and seemingly abandoning PR) and how to avoid this in the future (2). I don't feel qualified to answer (1), and I think no one should try to play contributor's therapist (unless, of course, you have the education and licence for that). I don't believe any professional boundaries were crossed or something unreasonable happened. Not from Cabal team's (including Francesco) side, at least. All the requests were fair and polite requests advocating for improving quality of Cabal's code base -- the very code base we interact a lot with, and quality of which we should try to improve. My answer to (2) -- you won't be able to avoid it in the future. Unless, of course, you are willing to abolish the code review process altogether. It really depends on a contributor and whether they are able to sustain the scrutiny of the process. And you can't control that. The response shouldn't be to lower the bar for the process imo. It is my opinion that the biggest improvement to the future of Cabal would be to get more high-quality feedback for contributions, not less. Thank you, Francesco, again! -- Kind Regards, Artem

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