Status updates

[Austin Seipp]

Hello all,

Here's what's gone on this week:

 - The HCAR is happening! I sent an email about this earlier, but
PLEASE, if you're working on something, add it to the page for the May
2014 report! I won't forget the link this time:

  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/May14

 - ORF is still waiting for a merge. I believe Simon was looking over
it this past week - I'm sure we'll talk about it later today.

 - AMP is still waiting for merge, I think we'll have to coordinate a
Happy release as well to match (the fix I have is slightly
unsatisfactory). I'll talk to Simon about this today.

 - My extended-rep-movsb patch is on wip/ermsb, but it needs to be
benchmarked and tested before I merge it. Unordered-containers will be
my baseline, since Johan tells me it's sensitive to copies like this
(it may also need alignment tweaking, on this note).

 - Many of the Coverity bugs have been fixed, hooray! We will probably
fix some more of them - all of the current fixes have gone into 7.8 as
well.

 - I triaged the bug tracker a lot this morning as I'm sure you can
all see. I went through a bunch of them, closed tickets, punted,
lowered priority, etc.

 - I've proposed to remove External Core - if you need it, you should
speak up *soon*, otherwise I will probably nuke it sometime this week:

http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-April/004791.html

  The work to do this is on wip/kill-extcore, so again, speak soon or
forever hold your peace.

  - The 7.8.3 milestone has been shaped up. Please take a look at the
outstanding tickets:

    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/milestone/7.8.3
    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=infoneeded&status=merge&status=new&status=patch&group=status&milestone=7.8.3

    Note that *not* all of these will be fixed - but these are the
ones we will pay attention to for the 7.8.3 release. So do have a look
over and if you think you can fix something, please do so!

-------------

Some things I've been thinking about:

 - One really annoying thing about the way we generate
source-distributions is that we must do a build first, but this
practically negates the need for a sdist! Joachim in particular finds
this annoying too for the Debian builds.

  Ideally we could build a source dist immediately from the
repository, and then build from that. This has the benefit the CI
system is always testing something that a user can build and make
themselves.

  The problem here is that we need to run Happy and Alex on the
parser, which is part of the stage1/stage2 build. Although it's kind
of a hack, I think we can do this differently, but I haven't tried it.
In particular, they do not depend on any CPP, so we could just
immediately generate them up front in the build process.

  This is kind of a gross hack from the build-system's point of view,
but it would make this task much easier.

 - For right now, I'd like to go with Stackage for building a subset
of packages against HEAD I think. Herbert recently uploaded fresh PPAs
for GHC HEAD recently, so I think we can already begin the process of
testing things and seeing how/why they break.

  Of course, not everyone will always need to pay attention to this,
and sometimes it *will* be broken (c.f. upcoming AMP changes). But in
the long run I think this will be very useful, and we can also set it
up for the 7.8 branch.

  I'll be spinning up some new machines today and reply with some
updates on this later.

-- 
Regards,

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