Release plans

[Simon Marlow]

This message is to keep everyone updated on our future release plans.
We are currently planning two new releases around the end of August: one
from the STABLE branch and one from the HEAD.

STABLE: 6.2.2
-------------

This will be the final release from the 6.2 branch, containing bugfixes
only relative to 6.2.1.

Please if you have any outstanding bugs in 6.2.1, drop us a note.  We'll
be doing a sweep through the SourceForge bug list and any other
outstanding bugs that we're aware of before the release, but we'd be
grateful if you could remind us if you still have an outstanding bug in
6.2.1 so that we can be sure not to miss anything.

HEAD: 6.4
---------

This release will have some significant rewrites, and is likely to be
less stable than 6.2.2.  Highlights:

  - completely new back-end (post-STG) based on a C-- intermediate
    language, including a largely rewritten native code generator.

  - Source locations inside the compiler are now much more
    comprehensive: pretty much every syntactic entity has an exact
    source span, so error messages should be a lot more accurate.

  - generalised algebraic data types (currently in development, might
    not make it into the release).

The following features are also slated for inclusion:

  - integration of some of the DData libraries
  - the new System.Process library
  - Data.Version library and System.Info.compilerVersion
  - various Template Haskell changes/fixes
  - changes to support Cabal
  - FFI updates (CString locale translation)
  - threaded RTS: I/O multiplexing simplification & speedup
  - new X11 & Win32 libraries(?)

Many of these features aren't in the tree yet, and/or haven't been
finished.  The end-Aug release date is variable, depending on how much
progress we make before then, and the feature list might change too.
Feedback welcome as usual - I've probably forgotten lots of stuff on
these lists.

Cheers,
	Simon