Grand Plan for 8.0.2

[Ben Gamari]

tl;dr: GHC 8.0.2 is coming, however there are a number of issues we
       would like to see resolved. Consequently it's not entirely clear
       when it will arrive, but if things go well it may be as early as
       this Friday.


Hello everyone,

Over the past few weeks I've been making preparations for the coming
8.0.2 release. I've merged a few more patches to the stable branch in
response to last week's call for merge requests, bringing the total up
to 180 commits since 8.0.1.

At this point there are only a couple things that remain to be cleared
up,

 * #12220, #12533: These are unfortunate behaviors of
   default signatures, #12220 being an interaction with type
   applications and #12533 being an obscure corner case. While we have a
   fix for these (d2958bd0), the fix changes the behavior of the
   typechecker's inaccessible code check, breaking some code on Hackage;
   this is documented as #12466. There are some tricky unresolved
   questions here regarding how we want the inaccessible code here to
   behave.

   At the moment I am leaning towards simply punting these off to 8.2.1.
   If you would like to see them fixed in 8.0.2, please say so.
   Moreover, please contribute your thoughts on #12466 as resolving the
   remaining questions on that ticket is a prerequisite for merging the
   fix for #12220.

 * #12954: Currently Haddock does not produce documentation for bundled
   pattern synonyms. There is a pull request [1] that may fix this but
   it is currently needing reviewers. It would be great to fix this for
   8.0.2, but ultimately someone is going to need to finish this up.

 * #10986: This is a rather unfortunate leak of temporary files which we
   would ideally fix since it can produce rather large temporary
   directories on the user's system.

 * #12519: Haddock inexplicably forgets to render the class members of
   Eq and Ord. It would be great if someone could get to the bottom of
   this.

 * #12433 is a rather nasty correctness bug which currently has no
   resolution.

 * #11819: There are still a number of full validation issues which
   would be nice to sort out.

I would like to be able to say that we have a concrete timeline for a
8.0.2 release and I was originally planning to propose a candidate
source release for late this week, however in light of the the large
number of unresolved issues, I think it would be unwise to commit to
this timeframe. I'll say that the candidate source tarball could come as
early as Friday, although sometime next week is far more likely.

As always, any help that you could offer on any of the above issues
would be greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://github.com/haskell/haddock/pull/494/commits/7984c8fb8f238793641a419c93fbcb4f6e933ae5
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