[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.0.2 release candidate 2

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

The GHC team is happy to announce the second candiate of the
8.0.2 release of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Source and binary
distributions are available at

    http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.2-rc2/

This is the second and likely final release candidate leading up the
8.0.2 release. This release will fix a number of bugs found in 8.0.1
including,

  * Interface file build determinism (#4012).

  * Compatibility with macOS Sierra and GCC compilers which compile 
    position-independent executables by default

  * Runtime linker fixes on Windows (see #12797)

  * A compiler bug which resulted in undefined reference errors while
    compiling some packages (see #12076)

  * Compatability with systems which use the gold linker

  * A number of memory consistency bugs in the runtime system

  * A number of efficiency issues in the threaded runtime which manifest
    on larger core counts and large numbers of bound threads.

  * A typechecker bug which caused some programs using
    -XDefaultSignatures to be incorrectly accepted.

  * More than two-hundred other bugs. See Trac [1] for a complete
    listing.

This release candidate fixes a number of issues present in -rc1,

  * #12757, which lead to broken runtime behavior and even crashes in
    the presence of primitive strings.

  * #12844, a type inference issue affecting partial type signatures.

  * A bump of the `directory` library, fixing buggy path
    canonicalization behavior (#12894). Unfortunately this required a
    major version bump in `directory` and minor bumps in several other
    libraries.

  * #12912, where use of the `select` system call would lead to runtime
    system failures with large numbers of open file handles.

If all goes well we should have a final 8.0.2 release out shortly after
the new year. As always, let us know if you encounter trouble. Thanks to
everyone who has contributed so far!

Happy testing,

- Ben


[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=closed&milestone=8.0.2&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority
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