Tentative high-level plans for 7.10.1

[Johan Tibell]

I re-targeted some of the bugs that were "obviously" the same SpecConstr
issue to 7.8.4. There are a few others that should probably also be
re-targeted, but I couldn't tell from a quick scan of the long comment
threads.

Looking at the 7.8.4 status page, it's now quite clear that the SpecConstr
bug is a show stopper i.e. it affects lots of people/core libraries and
doesn't really have a good workaround, as turning of SpecConstr will most
likely make e.g. vector too slow.

On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 11:23 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Oct 7, 2014 at 10:12 AM, Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com
> > wrote:
>
>> | 8960 looks rather serious and potentially makes all of 7.8 a no-go
>> | for some users.
>>
>
> I think this is the big issue. If you look at all the related bugs linked
> from #8960, lots of users are affected. I think this bug alone probably
> warrants a release. We should also move all those related bugs to the 7.8.4
> milestone, so the impact of this issue is more clear.
>
>
>> My conclusion
>>
>>  * I think we (collectively!) should make a serious attempt to fix
>> show-stopping
>>    bugs on a major release branch.  (I agree that upgrading to the next
>> major
>>    release often simply brings in a new wave of bugs because of GHC's
>>    rapid development culture.)
>>
>>  * We can only possibly do this if
>>    a) we can distinguish "show-stopping" from "nice to have"
>>    b) we get some help (thank you John Lato for implicitly offering)
>>
>
> All sounds good to me. I can help with backporting bug fixes if needed. In
> return I would encourage people to not mix bug fixes with "I rewrote the
> compiler" commits. :)
>
> I would define a "show-stopping" bug as one that simply prevents you from
>> using the release altogether, or imposes a very large cost at the user end.
>>
>
> Agreed.
>
> -- Johan
>
>
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