cabal-install 3.10 cannot be built with GHC 9.6

[9999years]

cabal-install 3.10 requires base >=4.10 && <4.18, but GHC 9.6 bundles base-4.18 along with cabal-install-3.10. The version bounds should be bumped.

Note that the GHC 9.6 release notes erroneously say that Cabal 3.9 is bundled with GHC 9.6; this is a mistake, as no Cabal 3.9 exists. The GHC 9.6 download page correctly notes that "GHC 9.6 only works with cabal-install version 3.10 or later." Although it doesn't entirely "work", as cabal-install-3.10 cannot be built with GHC 9.6's base by default.

[andreabedini]

Thanks @9999years.

To be pedantic, GHC 9.6 does not bundle cabal-install-3.10.1.0, it bundles Cabal-3.10.1.0 and Cabal-syntax-3.10.1.0. Those packages have both a compatible version bound on base (>=4.9 && <5).

That said, yes, cabal-install-3.10.1.0 and cabal-install-solver-3.10.1.0 might have a overly restrictive bound on base.

The following seems to indicate that this is indeed the case

$ cabal install --installdir=$INSTALLDIR -w ghc-9.6 --allow-newer={cabal-install,cabal-install-solver}:base cabal-install-3.10.1.0
....
Completed    cabal-install-3.10.1.0 (exe:cabal)
Symlinking 'cabal' to '/tmp/tmp.edlG6NrwNO/cabal'

@Mikolaj could you relax the bound on base on Hackage for cabal-install and cabal-install-solver? (Perhaps after some testing, don't just take my word :P).

[Mikolaj]

Thank you for the report. We are trying to add GHC 9.6 to CI in #8840. The base bump is already there. I hope the PR will be ready before the cabal 3.10.2.0 release, but we have all kinds of technical problems.

I reported to GHC folk about the release notes flop.

[Mikolaj]

It was explained to me the canonical release notes location is https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1/docs/users_guide/9.6.1-notes.html. There the version is correct. The other location is transient and not up to date at this point.

[9999years]

Can the 'transient' version be updated to indicate that it's non-canonical? As it stands, the 'transient' version is the first result for Googling "ghc 9.6 release notes".

[Mikolaj]

Indeed, it is so for me as well. That's unfortunate. Please file a GHC bug report.