Dan Burton
My questions at this point are:
* What are the reasons that hackage-server must be upgraded to Cabal 3?
I'll leave this to Herbert as I am also not clear on this point. None of the 8.8.1 boot packages should be relying on Cabal 3 syntax in their .cabal files so I'm not sure what specifically gives rise to this dependency.
* What are the reasons that make this upgrade difficult?
Cabal 3 does change quite a bit. In response to the number of requests to get this un-stuck I put in some work [1] this week and last to start the upgrade. Indeed the process is non-trivial and requires touching a lot of code. Nearly all of this churn is due to the removal of the Text typeclass in favor of the Parsec and Pretty typeclasses. These changes are generally quite mechanical but do take time.
* Can publishing to hackage be considered a proper part of the ghc release process in the future?
I am quite willing to handle the uploads as part of the release process if this is the direction we decide to take. Cheers, - Ben [1] https://github.com/bgamari/hackage-server/tree/cabal-3