Cabal/cabal-install 3.16.1.0 release checklist

[ulysses4ever]

Release manager: @ulysses4ever. Previous checklist: #11010 The Wiki page.

Regressions

• List all open regressions (in master and 3.16)
  • TODO

PRs of interest (DONE)

• external-commands interface update,
• cabal path including GHC ABI hash.

both merged.

Backports (DONE)

• @geekosaur: I've been tracking PRs going to master and tagged the ones of interest for backports. Many of those should already have been backported, but someone should do a check for any with the backport label that haven't been yet.

GHC concerns (DONE)

• Ask GHC devs what the name of the new release is, and if they plan to further add extensions or flags
  (Benjamin Gamari replied for 3.16.0.0: “The next major series will be 9.14. We do not plan on adding any additional extensions. I believe the same is true of flags.”)

• Is there anything else we need to sync with GHC? This is probably the last explicit ticket asking such a question for a release, so going quickly through each tickbox there may be worth the time: Release checklist for GHC 9.10 #9729

Release checklist

• Create a release checklist ticket @ulysses4ever done!

A.1 Before the release

• Pre-flight Checks: See Preflight checks @ffaf1 Preflight checks for 3.16.1.0 #11275 Preflight checks for 3.16 (Backport #11275)  #11280
• Changelog generation: See CHANGELOGS @geekosaur
  • R3.16.1.0 c.2 changelog #11306
• Bump version numbers: See Bumping version numbers
  • [N/A] SPDX (minor release)
  • Sign Artem’s key with other maintainers’ keys. (cross signed w/ f-a key)
  • hackage-security
  • update max ghc version
  • re-pin index state and re-test with new hackage-security
  • bump copyrights
  • bump versions
    • master (3.17)
    • 3.16
• Add ghc 9.14 to validate and bootstrap (waiting on it to be added upstream)
• Tag the release: See Tagging the release
• Upload release candidates: See Uploading package release candidates to Hackage
• Publish artifacts: See Publishing the artifacts
• Publish everything else: See Publishing everything else
• Tweak things as needed, merge patches to fix regressions
• Re-upload the candidates on Hackage based on the latest tag, and publish them

A.2 After the release

• [] prepare a list of contributors for the release, e.g., git log --use-mailmap --pretty=format:%an Cabal-v3.6.1.0...Cabal-v3.8.1.0 | sort -u and don't forget to mention "reviewers, QA testers, devops and others"
• [] advertise on discourse, haskell-cafe and cabal-devel and in particular, mention:
  • How to install using ghcup
  • Changelogs
  • Fixed regression compared to the previous version
  • Regressions still unfixed
  • How great our community is and how we love and cherish collaborators
• ask kind souls to cross-post to Mastodon, Matrix (#haskell-tooling and #haskell-language-server), Discord, Twitter, Reddit. Copy the links to #hackage so that others can upvote
• Move the tickets that haven't made it to the release to the next one.
• party 🥳
• post-mortem