Change in GHC release timing policy

[Ben Gamari]

tl;dr. We'll be introducing a week-long gap between the tagging of the
       source release and the release announcement to allow providers of
       binary distributions to get their builds together.


Hello everyone!

While Austin and I try to produce binary distributions for as many of
the major platforms as we can, we are of course unable to support
everything. Thankfully, we are lucky to have a number of reliable
contributors who consistently provide builds for those platform that we
can't handle ourselves.

These include,

    Karel Gardas, who provides Solaris, OpenBSD, and Linux builds for a
                  variety of platforms
  
  
    Páli Gábor János, who provides FreeBSD builds
  
    Jens Petersen, who ensures that GHC is well-represented on Redhat
                   distributions
  
    Gershom, Jason Dagit, who handle build of the Haskell Platform on
                          many platforms
  
    Randy Polen, who handles building of the Haskell Platform on Windows

    Herbert Valerio Riedel, who handles AIX builds

They all deserve our thanks.

However, our release process has until now not treated their efforts on
an equal footing with the binary distributions produced by GHC HQ. In an
attempt to fix this we're going to try changing the timing of GHC
releases,

  * The source release will be tagged and tarballs pushed to a staging
    area

  * We will soon thereafter notify the binary distribution builders and
    ghc-devs@

  * Everyone will go to work on their binary distributions

  * One week after the source release is tagged the release artifacts
    will be pushed to downloads.haskell.org and the release publicly
    announced.

We hope that this will remove some of the confusion from the current
process while ensuring that all platforms have the potential for support
on the day of the release. We'll be trying this for 8.0.1-rc3 and the final
release. If all goes well we'll continue this policy in future releases.

Cheers,

- Ben
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