Release for GHC 8.8

[bgamari]

While GHC is quite behind in the alpha cycle this time around due to shuffling around of infrastructure, I would still like to make sure we have plenty of time to stabilize submodules before the final release in February. Our original plan stated that core library version numbers would be set by mid-December and core library releases for 8.8 would be ready by late January. How are we looking compared to these benchmarks?

[hvr]

@bgamari btw, I was in the midst of updating lib:Cabal in GHC HEAD to a more recent snapshot and got side-tracked cause there are some API adaptation necessary and those exposed some bugs that needed to be fixed before the update can proceed... and this prompted #5812 ... and.... long story short... we need to resolve this before it even makes any sense to bump the version (which we should be able to do soon afterwards; the version bump was supposed to happen together with #5800 ...)

[bgamari]

Any updates on this?

[hvr]

@bgamari #5812 just got merged, and I'm right now trying to fwd port https://gitlab.haskell.org/hvr/ghc/commit/d6428a5e3533e0c94a68f854f8b543f6a52405b1 to it

[bgamari]

How is this looking?

[bgamari]

How close are we to being able to pin down a final submodule commit?

[23Skidoo]

@fgaz @hvr What's the state of the public sublibraries feature? Do we need anything else on the lib:Cabal side?

[fgaz]

I need to write a fallback for ghc<8.8 in #5848, then multilibs will be complete

[hvr]

@23Skidoo if we're talking about an actual hard freeze of 3.0, I think there's a few loose ends (one of which might be the 3.0 variant of #5837 which might require changes to lib:Cabal, @fgaz might know this) which should ideally be resolvable within 1-2 weeks; weekend's coming up, so I'll be able to take a closer look a the 3.0 situation and give a more concrete answer

[fgaz]

#5837 requires no changes to lib:Cabal

[fgaz]

There's also this parsing bug: #5846

But It's on new functionality and there are no regressions, so it it's not super important

[bgamari]

Thanks everyone! It sounds like we are converging. It would be great if we could have this sorted out in the next week or so.

[bgamari]

How are things going here?

[fgaz]

Public sublibraries: I'm awaiting review on #5848

[bgamari]

This is really starting to become urgent. Given the how far behind GHC's release schedule is I really do not want to start the GHC pre-release process before Cabal has finalized its version number. This is not to say that Cabal-3 has to be final; I merely want to avoid having any boot library version bumps after the first pre-release is out.

[harpocrates]

Would it be possible to know what the expected version is for this release of Cabal? That way, Haddock can tentatively declare support for it (and provide a tentatively final submodule commit for GHC).