[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.4.1-alpha1 available

[George Colpitts]

Probably stating what is obvious and well-know but anyways:

   - On the status page
   <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-8.4.1> it would be
   good to have a link for "Phase 2 of the Semigroup-Monoid Proposal (Herbert
   Riedel)"
   - Also IIRC we normally have a page on porting to the new release. It
   would be good to have that also when we have a chance.

It's great that we are getting started early.

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 4:16 PM George Colpitts <george.colpitts at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Ben. I installed the Mac binaries.
>
> For others who are wondering, you need llvm 5 if you want to use llvm with
> this.
>
> Needless to say, many libraries, e.g. haskell-src-exts, primitive, and
> intero won't compile with this even with --allow-newer
>
> I'll notify those libraries about that in case they want to get started on
> 8.4.1
>
> Cheers
> George
>
> On Wed, Dec 20, 2017 at 4:48 PM Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> The GHC development team is pleased to announce the first alpha release
>> of the 8.4.1 release. The usual release artifacts are available from
>>
>>     https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.1-alpha1
>>
>> Note that this release drops compatibility with GCC 4.6 and earlier.
>> While we generally try to place as few constraints on system toolchain
>> as possible, this release depends upon the __atomic__ builtins provided
>> by GCC 4.7 and later (see #14244).
>>
>>
>> === Notes on release scheduling ===
>>
>> The 8.4.1 release marks the first release where GHC will be adhering to
>> its new, higher-cadence release schedule [1]. Under this new scheme,
>> major releases will be made in 6-month intervals with interstitial minor
>> releases as necessary.
>>
>> In order to minimize the likelihood of schedule slippage and to ensure
>> adequate testing, each major release will be preceeded by a number of
>> regular alpha releases. We will begin issuing these releases roughly
>> three months before the final date of the major release and will issue
>> roughly one every two weeks during this period. This high release
>> cadence will allow us to quickly get fixes in to users hands and allow
>> better feedback on the status of the release.
>>
>> GHC 8.4 is slated to be released in mid-February but, due to technical
>> constraints, we are starting the alpha-release cycle a bit later than
>> planned under the above schedule. For this reason, it would be greatly
>> appreciated if users could put this alpha through its paces to make up
>> for lost time.
>>
>> As always, do let us know if you encounter any trouble in the course of
>> testing. Thanks for your help!
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> - Ben
>>
>>
>> [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/2017-release-schedule
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>
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