7.8.1 RC

[Austin Seipp]

Hello all,

First and foremost, I realize that I said an RC was coming on Friday
along with a branch, but I've unfortunately been a bit behind the gun
this week, and several things more things have come to my attention
recently.

For the delay, I am very sorry. Here's an update on the most pertinent
tickets and what needs to happen.

One thing is that Herbert and I would like to upload many of the
bootstrap libraries to hackage to coincide with the release, but this
requires a server upgrade that should happen quite soon (thanks to
Duncan/Herbert.)

Herber and I also went over #8305, which should (in our opinion)
certainly be part of the RC so issues can be filed, and clearly
documented. Herbert has a patch for this, and I'll review it today.

Second, the new OS X release, Mavericks (and, by association, XCode 5)
seem to be a little confusing at the moment, and I don't have access
to these machines quite yet. Only a Lion machine.

One reason this is a delay is because I don't quite understand e.g.
#8497 and #8493 in particular. There has also historically been some
issues with different OS X builds not working on different platforms
due to XCode and/or strange ABI issues, so I need to make my own to
double check.

Preprocessing seems to becoming a hot issue* on the note of #8493, and
this also certainly needs attention once I get my hands on a machine.
There's been a lot of pain around making all this 'work correctly',
and working by proxy is simply becoming difficult I think, so I just
need to dig into it a bit once I have my hands on something.

Also relevant to this is that I'll be signing the announcement, and
giving out tarballs with checksums(!), so some of these issues must be
fixed for distribution (like #5987, which I am still investigating.)

Finally, I have some incoming patches to fix a few of the critical
priority bugs (related to Windows, mostly,) but they need to be
polished and I need to investigate some other things related to them
(e.g. due to lack of time, I only have a 'very slow path' fix for
#8228, which is a bit annoying. And also this new msys2 thing.)

* Richard Smith, if you're out there, I should have listened to you on
the LLVM list. I'll learn from this one.

-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/