Re: [GHC-Releases] GHC 9.10 release schedule and core library status

Thanks, Ben. (I’m not subscribed to mail lists CC’d, so I expect this reply to be missing from them) CC’ng Matthew Craven on behalf of bytestring, Xia Li-yao on behalf of text, Lei Zhu, Carsten König and Miao ZhiCheng on behalf of array (it’s not orphaned). Several blockers from the top of my head: * Bump containers submodule to 0.7, long overdue. AFAIR blocked on https://github.com/judah/haskeline/pull/186 - Ben, are you able to merge it? * Bump filepath submodule to 1.5 and add os-string to boot libraries. Julian might remember better, but AFAIR there are no blockers, just someone has to upgrade several submodules at once. * GHCJS progress depends on merging outstanding PRs for bytestring and text to provide pure Haskell implementations, and I imagine Sylvain (CC’d) would wish them to be merged and released before GHC 9.10 is forked. * Mikolaj, are we looking for Cabal 3.12 or carrying on with 3.10.3+? There are at least two important features missing from Cabal 3.10: semaphores and multiple home units. Best regards, Andrew

On 22 Jan 2024, at 16:00, Ben Gamari wrote:

Hi all,

First, apologies for the silence regarding the 9.10 fork; I was hoping to improve our communications with boot library authors in the run-up to GHC 9.10 but illness unfortunately took me largely out of commission for a first few weeks of the year. Happily, things are looking rosier now.

Having had a chance to look at the 9.10 branch and the release goals, I am planning to cut the fork for GHC 9.10 around a month from today, on 23 Februrary 2024. This leaves around a month of time to merge the `ghc-internals` split and a few of the other bits of work that remain outstanding. We anticipate the first alpha release will come a week after the fork (see the Milestone [1] for further details).

How does this sound to you?

For organizational purposes, it would be helpful if we designated a coordinating maintainer for each of our boot packagers for the 9.10 release. My understanding is that our boot libraries have the following primary maintainers but don't hesitate to let me know if you believe this to be incorrect:

| Package | Maintainer | | --------------- | -------------------------- | | Cabal | Mikolaj Konarski | | Win32 | Tamar Christina | | array | (orphaned) | | binary | Lennart Kolmodin? | | bytestring | Andrew Lelechanko | | containers | David Feuer | | deepseq | Melanie Phoenix | | directory | Phil Rufflewind | | exceptions | Ryan Scott | | filepath | Julian Ospald | | haddock | Hecate | | haskeline | Judah Jacobson | | hpc | David Binder | | mtl | Emily Pillmore | | parsec | Oleg Grenrus | | process | Michael Snoyman | | stm | Simon Marlow | | terminfo | Judah Jacobson | | text | Andrew Lelechanko | | time | Ashley Yakeley | | transformers | Ross Paterson | | unix | Julian Ospald |

It would be great if each maintainer could let me know what they would like to do for the 9.10 release. In general we would love to have the set of boot libraries pinned down at least in version by the second alpha, which we are planning for the second week of March 2024. Does this sound reasonable?

As always, I would encourage core library maintainers to be conservative in their plans for a GHC release and avoid introducing major features or refactorings in their release. Such changes both add risk to the release schedule and complicate the users' migration paths; consequently, they are ideally best held for releases asynchronous to the GHC release process.

Thanks again for all of your work!

Cheers,

- Ben

[1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/milestones/380#tab-issues