On Fri, 2008-01-25 at 07:22 -0800, Duncan Coutts wrote:

Thu Sep 20 05:11:25 PDT 2007 Duncan Coutts * Add a Distribution.Setup module that re-exports Distribution.Simple.Setup Many Setup.hs files import Distribution.Setup so this unbreaks them. It's marked DEPRECATED so will generate a warning for scripts that use it. This patch is only going to the cabal-1.2 branch, not HEAD.

So as you can see, I relented and applied this patch in the HEAD too. The reason is that I'd like to see a Cabal-1.4 release in the GHC-6.8.x era. Not to be bundled with GHC, but to be compatible with all the packages that were developed for GHC-6.8.x/Cabal-1.2.x. So I checked all the 751 Setup.(l)hs scripts on hackage with both Cabal-1.2.3.0 and the current 1.3.3 development version. There were 4 that compiled with 1.2.3.0 and failed with 1.3.3. Those 4 are fixed with the above patch. So, the aim for the Cabal-1.4 release is that it be API compatible with the 1.2 series for Setup.hs scripts. However it does not need to be API compatible for anything else, ie the parts of the Cabal API that Setup.hs scripts do not use. So other programs that use Cabal like the ones for building rpms, deps etc are expected to break (though fixing them should be straightforward). As you'll have noticed with the huge email flood. I updated the milestones yesterday in the trac. I'll write more about release plans later. I'll be asking for help from everyone to review what bugs and features we want to target for 1.4 and more importantly, help in picking them off. The main goal for 1.4 will be to support a stable release of cabal-install, to get that out to more users. So the features and fixes we want to include in cabal-install is also relevant for this milestone. Duncan