Status updates

[Austin Seipp]

Hi all,

 - The HCAR entry was quickly completed last week thanks to everyone,
much appreciated for the quick response! And it made me aware of some
other new things in the pipeline, too. :)

 - Simon is in-progress reviewing the ORF work still. But it's
happening, so be patient of course (it's a large patch after all).

 - After a short discussion last week and a small grace period I
killed external core, and removed all traces of it from the GHC tree.
We constantly add things to GHC as Richard noted, so removing
something was nice, even if a little sad. The result was about 3,000
fewer lines in the source tree.

 - I need to send a patch upstream to Ross for the AMP changes, but I
slacked off a bit since the release of the new transformers got pushed
back, pending some discussions on libraries at haskell.org - I'll be
sending the results to Ross later today.

 - I spent some time working on removing the need for a build from
creation of the source distribution like I mentioned last week - so
'make sdist' almost works out of the box. I believe it works fine, but
it needs some more testing, and I feel like I should float the patch
by for review on the list first, Simon in particular might have
something to say. Do watch this space.

 - I'm going to continue working on trying HEAD with Stackage and
putting the results somewhere, I just sort of left this as is right
now.

Also, remember from last week, the 7.8.3 milestone has been shaped up
to be what we will look at - please do look over the tickets here when
you get a chance! I'll be likely seeing if any new tickets will go
here today:

    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

Some other things worth noting:

 - It's time to merge up a lot of the patch queue. I'll be doing that
soon - if you floated a patch by and want to discuss it or you want to
make me aware of a patch you have, please let me know. At worst you
will just inform me of something I already knew.

 - Side note, since a few people might be keen to know - Herbert took
the time this week to move darcs.haskell.org onto a new server,
effectively putting it in legacy mode. The switch has not yet
happened, because we need to do a DNS switch.

That's all, it was pretty light this week for me actually! We didn't
actually have a call today yet actually, but we will have one next
week and have more to say for sure.

Do let me know if you have questions.

-- 
Regards,

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