[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.2.1 release candidate 3 available

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

I am pleased to at long last announce the third (and almost certainly
last) release candidate of GHC 8.2.1. Binary and source distributions
can be found at,

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.2.1-rc3/

This release candidate fixes a number of regressions from 8.0.2 found in
-rc2, as well as a major correctness bug (#13615) present in several previous GHC
major releases. Users taking advantage of parallelism in their programs
will be strongly encouraged to upgrade to 8.2.1 once it is released.
Among the other issues resolved in this candidate are,

 * Functionality allowing GHC to automatically use the ld.gold linker
   when available (see #13541). Not only has there recently been
   significant user demand for this feature, but this also serves to
   work around a performance bug in BFD ld affecting GHC 8.2 (#13739)

 * A regression resulting in the package cache file to be out-of-date
   after binary distribution installation (#13375)

 * Numerous type-checker bugs (#13625, #1370, #13782, #13871, #13594,
   #13879, #13881, #13875)

 * A bug wherein a thread blocked on a BLACKHOLE may not be woken up (#13751)

 * and many more...

There are a few changes in release-engineering matters that should be
mentioned,

 * Binary distributions for CentOS 6.7 have been dropped due to the
   release of CentOS 7.0 which can use Debian 8 binaries. If you would
   like us to continue to produce CentOS 6.7 bindists please let me
   know.

 * GHC HQ now also provides FreeBSD and OpenBSD distributions for amd64;
   this will allow us to more quickly ship distributions to users by
   eliminating the need for a long lag time between source release
   availability and having all binary distributions available.

 * There is a technology-preview of an AArch64 Linux binary
   distribution, as well as an ARM Linux build (although the latter
   won't be uploaded until a few hours from now). AArch64 support is
   quite preliminary but should be stable in 8.4 thanks to further
   linker fixes by Moritz Angerman. ARM should be stable.

As always, let us know if you encounter problems. If all goes well we
will hopefully have a final 8.2.1 release in the next two weeks.

Finally, thanks for your patience during this admittedly quite drawn out
release cycle. While it has been long, we are confident that the result
will be worth the wait. Moreover, we have been steadily working on
infrastructure which should shrink future release cycles and give us
better testing between releases. More details on this coming soon.

Happy testing,

- Ben
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