The GHC 9.8.3 Dilemma

GHC 9.8.3 was released on October 20th, as announced on Discourse. Support was quickly added to Stackage, and the nightly resolver switched to it on October 22nd (nightly-2024-10-22). I have not been able to configure my projects to test with this release, however, because it has not been made available via GHCup (via the default channel). Testing locally is no problem, but the new release is also needed in GitHub Actions test environments, and haskell-actions/setup uses GHCup for installation. I have been keeping an eye on the ghcup-metadata issue, where a comment indicated that the delay was due to being busy, but the issue has now been closed stating that this release will not be supported! There is no clear explanation, but perhaps the reason is that filepath version 1.4.200.1 is shipped even though GHC 9.6.6 has already shipped with version 1.4.300.1.

I have not yet decided what I will do. I do not think there is an easy way to install from non-default channels using haskell-actions/setup. I could create a separate job/task that installs and tests against GHC 9.8.3 specially. This is probably what I should do, but it is difficult to allocate the time for it.

Alternatively, I could “wait for” GHC 9.8.4 like GHCup is doing. The release checklist and milestone have been created, but I am not sure what the target release date looks like. This is the easy option, but it feels neglectful.

lsupg relies on the GHCup builds for Alpine Linux, since the official Alpine builds have been broken. If the official builds for this release are broken, I think I will skip GHC 9.8.4 support for this project. It is not very important for this project in particular because it is not in Hackage or Stackage (since it needs to be built statically).