When shall we update the pinned index state in gitlab release CI?

[Mikolaj]

I'm opening a new separate ticket for this question, because this has cost us a serious problem in the 3.10.3.0 release process: an urgent serious upstream fix has not been included in a nearly released deemed-final binaries: haskell/tar#89 (comment)

Older related discussion:

#9610 (comment)

#9808

[Mikolaj]

@Kleidukos: in case of release 3.10.3.0 (and 3.12.0.0), due to haskell/tar#89, I guess we have to update the index right now?

[Kleidukos]

Yes we have to restart the whole process. I'll submit a PR for 3.10

[hasufell]

Just fyi: the binaries that you test in the validate pipeline are potentially not the same as the ones you release (cabal.project.validate does not use index state pinning).

[Kleidukos]

@hasufell ok I'm addressing this in #9820

[Mikolaj]

@hasufell: yes, we are discussing this for the last week. For now, we --dry-run build the release project file with the pinned index state on GHA. There's a plan to run full tests on gitlab. There is a plan to use head.hackage to test against bleeding edge and then we could fix the index in the normal validate tests and not worry that our CI can't reproduce problems users (that compile from source) are having. I don't think we should make radical changes without a proper discussion, except for the disastrous too old index state on release pipeline.

[hasufell]

Well, I have no skin in this game. I have my own way of building cabal release binaries.

[Kleidukos]

That looks like a lot of moving parts from a glance

[chreekat]

Ouch. :(

What bit Cabal here is not the question of when to do semiautomatic freshness bumps, but the fact that the validation CI and the release CI don't share a pin. I think we can just call that a longstanding bug unrelated to the title of this issue.

Whether a pin is updated on a semiregular basis to keep deps fresh, or whether it's updated explicitly to pull in a specific required dep, all CI pipelines should use the same pin, and ideally it is only defined once!

[Kleidukos]

Isn't Phil trying to get a PR in that would substantially increase sharing between cabal project files?

[Kleidukos]

Anyhoo, I'll proceed with my PR for 3.10.