GHC 7.8 Release Status & Schedule

[Austin Seipp]

Friends,

After talking with Simon yesterday, we have some idea of how the
release will go. As I'm sure you're aware, the release is winding down
rather quickly, and it will be a fantastic one hopefully :)

Now that all the features have landed, we're going into bugfixing
mode. The schedule is, roughly:

 - Nov 1st: Cut branch, and I plan on making a 7.8 RC1 available the
same day, for several platforms.
 - Release will be ~3 weeks out from there, approximately Nov 25th.

This gives us a month of solid bugfixing.

During the 3 weeks with the 7.8 branch open, I'm a bit hesitant to
land massive changes, so that our branches don't diverge too far.
OTOH, a few things can probably land in this timeframe with minimal
disturbances (such as the Applicative-Monad change.) If you want to
land something in that time frame, please just ask me.

On the whole, things actually feel pretty good - although there a few
nasty bugs to sort out, the uptake in community involvement has simply
been fantastic (definitely related to the number bugs we've found,)
and I think we're on track to sort the remaining stuff out. A great
thanks to all of the new people helping out!

And if you want to help even more, please check out the tickets
remaining for 7.8.1:

http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=!closed&milestone=7.8.1&order=priority

If you think you can take on a bug, please assign it to yourself so we
know what's going on. Note: if the bug isn't *high* or *highest*, it's
unlikely to get looked at, at least by me! It won't be rejected if you
submit a patch, but I'm simply not going to be able to get to it I'm
afraid. So please grab something, and go for it!

I am also reminded that the GHC October Status report will be due
shortly - I'll take some time to write it up, and follow through here
on the list (and glasgow-haskell-users) so interested parties can read
up on what is happening.


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