GHC Weekly News - 2015/02/23

[Austin Seipp]

(This post is available online at
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/edit/weekly20150223)

Hi *,

It's once again time for your sometimes-slightly-irregularly-scheduled
GHC news! This past Friday marked the end of the FTP vote for GHC
7.10, there's an RC on the way (see below), we've closed out a good
set of patches and tickets from users and pushed them into `HEAD`, and
to top it off - it's your editor's birthday today, so that's nice!

Quick note: as said above GHC HQ is expecting to make a '''third'''
release candidate for GHC 7.10.1 soon in early March since the delay
has allowed us to pick up some more changes and bugfixes. We plan on
the final release being close to the end of March (previously end of
February).

This week, GHC HQ met up again to discuss and write down our current
priorities and thoughts:

  - After discussing our current timetable - as we're currently
hovering around the ICFP deadline - we're hoping to make our third GHC
7.10.1 release candidate on '''Friday, March 13th''', with the final
release on '''Friday, March 27th'''. This was the main take away from
our meeting today.

We've also had a little more list activity this week than we did before:

  - The FTP debate has ended, and the results are in: GHC 7.10.1 will
continue with the generalized Prelude, known as "Plan FTP".
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/libraries/2015-February/025009.html

  - Edward Kmett announced the `directory` package needed an active
maintainer to step up - and luckily, Phil Ruffwind and Elliot Robinson
did just that and stepped up as maintainers!
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008358.html

  - Kazu Yamamoto asked about a behavioral change in `ghc-7.10` for
`Data.Char` - it turns out this difference looks like it's caused by
GHC 7.10 shipping an update to use Unicode 7.0 datasets.
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008371.html

  - Thomas Bereknyei asked about a fundamental change in the Arrow
desugarer, and whether or not something like this was worth it. Jan
Stolarek and Ross Paterson stepped in to speak up to some specifics
Thomas had about.
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008377.html

  - Gabor Grief spoke up about strange behavior in the desugarer when
using `RebindableSyntax` and `RankNTypes`, which Adam Gundry popped in
to say may be a deeper issue due to the way typechecking and
desugaring interact -
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008383.html

   - Johan Tibell announced Cabal 1.22.1.0, which will ship with GHC
7.10. https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-February/008388.html

Some noteworthy commits that went into `ghc.git` in the past week include:

  - Commit 1b82619bc2ff36341d916c56b0cd67a378a9c222 - The `hpc`
commands now take a configurable verbosity level (merged to `ghc-7.10)

  - Commit 0fa20726b0587530712677e50a56c2b03ba43095 - GHC now errors
out on a module explicitly declared `Main` without a `main` export.

Closed tickets the past week include: #9266, #10095, #9959, #10086,
#9094, #9606, #9402, #10093, #9054, #10102, #4366, #7604, #9103,
#10104, #7765, #7103, #10051, #7056, #9907, #10078, #10096, #10072,
#10043, #9926, #10088, #10091, #8309, #9049, #9895, and #8539.

-- 
Regards,

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