7.8 Release Update

[Austin Seipp]

Friends,

The time is here! We'll be closing off new features this week. There
are some exceptions that have been made already:

 * Geoffrey will get SIMD/Template Haskell in this week, as he's been
a little busy. But it's very close.
 * I believe Trevor and Iavor would still like to get Kinds without
Data in the release, but Simon is currently on leave for the next few
days, so we'll see once he gets back to look into it.

There are some other lingering potential features that might make it
(of various sizes,) but it's not clear they will be done in time.
We'll be going on a case-by-case basis as I said. Do you have a
feature you'd like to see make it in? Did you write a patch for some
super cool feature? Please email me (either on list, or off-list) and
we can discuss it.

Again, today isn't a hard-line requirement, but at this point, I
*have* to be aware of what you're doing, for you to have any chance of
making the merge window. Several people have already done this, and
we're discussing it.

If you have a patch, but you're in doubt if it is too big, just email
me. Or get ahold of me on IRC (thoughtpolice.) You can't really waste
my time on this note.

And of course, please continue to liberally report bugs (or patches!)
- it's much better if we find them as early as possible.


On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 6:27 PM, Austin Seipp <aseipp at pobox.com> wrote:
> 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



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