# Cabal devs meeting (14/03/2024)

Previous meeting notes at: https://hackmd.io/-J2S6PUDSKuR18daDOZlIA

## Current affairs
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- Release 3.12.0.0 (Francesco Ariis): I am following [the steps illustrated in the (useful) wiki](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/wiki/Making-a-release#33-bumping-version-numbers), updating them when necessary. I am stuck on `make bootstrap-json`, with a failing assert.
I need some time from previous release manager (Mikolaj? Hécate?) to overcome this and most importatly document it thoroughly for future releases.
**action**: Mikolaj and Francesco will pair, update the wiki, fix the bootstrap stuff.
- GSoC mentor for cabal vulnerability check needed (Mikolaj, Gershom): https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/cabal-devel/2024-March/010585.html.
**action:** volounteer to [Summer of Haskell](https://summer.haskell.org/ideas.html#cabal-audit-vulnerable-dependencies). [PR against this](https://github.com/haskell-org/summer-of-haskell/blob/master/content/ideas/cabal-audit-vulnerable-dependencies.md) to voulunteer.
- mentors and newcomer tickets needed for 2024 Haskell Ecosystem Workshop, June 6-7, co-located with Zurihac (Mikolaj): https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2024-March/136618.html
**action**: we found some, but if anyone wants to volounteer, that would be awesome.
- [#9620](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9620): done! —FA
- [#9583](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9583): Needs review. Can it make the 3.12 release? (Fendor)
- Fendor suggests this to be merged before 3.12 or to revert the commit that implements an incomplete cabal path for 3.12. Rodrigo agrees.

**action**: Fendor check if this is not a breaking change (which would require a major version bump). If it is not a breaking change, it would have ≃1 month to land on master and then `cabal 3.12.1.0`.

## Review needed
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[Sixteen PRs](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9729) are in a `needs-review` state.
* [Make Cabal agnostic about working directory](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9718), read Sam's last comment before reviewing. (Rodrigo)
* [Setup Hooks](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9551) is ready to review and merge \o/
* [testsuite: Add some unit tests for #9466 #9467](https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9468) (Kristen)
* Private dependencies (Rodrigo): it is getting cleaned up, will be soon be ready for review. There is some strange but with GHC 9.0.

## Food for thought
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- shall we fix `--index-state` in (most of?) CI, etc. (Mikolaj): https://github.com/haskell/cabal/pull/9610#discussion_r1522602719

- Brandon: agree with Bryan's points from the discussion that fixing the index state is useful for a more robust CI.
- Artem: there is no argument against it, but it is not high priority. Accomodating head.hackage would be a higher priority. Fixing the index state wouldn't save you from dealing with failures due to Hackage updates, it just puts you on a more predictable schedule of when you deal with those failures (points where you update the state).
- Mikolaj: Unless the failures are already fixed by the point we update our fixed index. But by then we may be inundated by user reports that we can't reproduce in our CI, which is yet another way in which we can't escape the failures some of the time, but they don't disrupt our regular PR merging process at least. There is also the related issue of isolating ourselves from GHA (via containers or custom ghcup invocations). Similar considerations apply. I estimate each has bitten us ~5 times in the last couple of years. That's not many times, but that kind of firefighting tends to burn out maintainers (however, nothing fully isolates us from this, because stack and cabal are the go-to bug trackers for affected users).

(Mikolaj will open a ticket about head.hackage in CI, discussion will take place there. Done: https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/9808)