"Simon Marlow"
On 10 February 2005 16:18, Ross Paterson wrote:
On Thu, Feb 10, 2005 at 03:33:48PM -0000, Simon Marlow wrote:
I more or less agree with all this, but it's too late to get any API changes into 6.4 now. We might have to start thinking about backwards compatibility.
There's a dissonance between the need to ship GHC and the unfinished state of Cabal. Most of the interface is worked out, but there are a few parts (not the parts currently used by GHC) that are experimental and/or need fixing, and these have had very little user feedback. I think this will be a beta release for Cabal, and its interface will need changing soon. What to do? Independent releases of Cabal updates?
It's certainly possible to produce an updated version of Cabal later on, released independently of GHC. However, that's a bit of a pain - if there are only a few minor interface changes to go in, I'm prepared to hold the GHC release until they're finished.
I'm still a bit worried; I suspect the Distribution.Make stuff is out of date, and if we're under a freeze already then that should probably go away. setup sdist has bitrotted too, and I don't have a hugs test suite yet. The change I made to add preprocessors to UserHooks is pretty important, IMO. I can definitely release cabal separately; I have maintained an independent tree, as you know, but there are obviously problems with this. Are we under a code freeze right now? Can we get another weekend to hack on it? There's yet another problem that there is a Debian release coming up and the version of cabal, hugs, and GHC that ends up in that is a big deal. Ideally, we could all release hugs, ghc, and cabal together, safely before the Debian release, but I'm worried that this won't happen. Oh, and there was just a release at work too. meh. So my annoying question is: how long can we hold off GHC and how soon can we get Hugs :) peace, isaac