7.8 Release Update

[Austin Seipp]

Friends,

After talking with SPJ, we've decided that the cutoff date for the 7.8
feature window will essentially start on Monday, the 16th. This is the
beginning of the week before ICFP. This is a week from tomorrow.

Afterwords, I suspect we will cut the 7.8 branch in early October (my
notes tentatively say Oct. 9th.) This will give us a few weeks of
straight bugfixing.

Don't let this scare you too much. We're doing this at the beginning
of the week so we have time to sort things out. Bug fixes will of
course continuously be welcome until the 7.8 branch.

However, for pending features, I'd like a status update. Everyone
mentioned below, please reply to clarify anything:

 * Iavor Diatchki and SPJ are working together on the type-nats-simple
branch. I believe this will hopefully land in time. Iavor, SPJ - can
you comment here?

 * Trevor and Iavor are also working on kinds without data. Any word here?

 * Geoffrey is currently moving, but he says the SIMD work and new
template-haskell work will land by the end of this week, which is
great.

 * Patrick Palka has a few loose ends to tie off for the parallel
compilation driver. I talked to him today, and after Andreas committed
his bugfix to base, I believe everything is now working, with the
deadlocks sorted out. Patrick, can you confirm? We can get this merged
ASAP if so.

 * Pedro and Richard - what's the story on propositional equality,
etc? This is mentioned on the status page[1] but I'm not sure what
else needs to be done. I know Pedro committed the work to make manual
Typeable instances an error, which is great.

 * Luite and Edsko will be talking about some final changes to the
hooks patch, and afterwords it can hopefully be integrated. I'll keep
up with them this week.

 * I am currently working on integrating the Applicative-Monad
warning, but this requires some upstream patches for the build to
work. However, we still need to sync several upstream libraries, and
this will be happening over the next few weeks. Therefore, I may
commit it, and incrementally fix validation errors as time goes on and
me and Herbert sync upstreams.

IMO, most of these look to be in good shape, I think.

If you *do not think you'll make it by the 16th*, please let me know.
We can possibly still land it the week of the 16th, provided I know
ASAP. But we really really need to know, because many people will be
gone the following week.

In the following few days, I'm hoping going to finish off everything I
can in the patch queue, and fix my remaining bugs, and investigate
Dynamic GHCi in particular.

Again, if you don't think you can make it on the 16th, but still
within the week, we can of discuss it.

-- 
Regards,
Austin - PGP: 4096R/0x91384671