ANNOUNCE: GHC vesrion 6.4.2

[Simon Marlow]

   =============================================================
    The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 6.4.2
   =============================================================

The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new patchlevel release of GHC.
This release contains a significant number of bugfixes relative to
6.4.1, so we recommend upgrading.  

Highlights in this release:

  - Cabal has been upgraded to version 1.1.4.  While strictly speaking
    this breaks our rules about not changing any library APIs in a
    patchlevel release, it was felt that the Cabal shipped in 6.4.1
    was lacking in various ways, and it was more important to provide a
    Cabal that works with more existing packages.  Some distributions
    of GHC were already supplying an upgraded Cabal by default.

With the exception of Cabal, and OpenAL which was also upgraded, all
library APIs are identical to 6.4.1.

Release notes are here:

  http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4.2/html/users_guide/release-6-4-2.html


How to get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory:

        http://www.haskell.org/ghc/

We supply binary builds in the native package format for many
platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same
place.

Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your
system isn't available yet, please try again later.


Background
~~~~~~~~~~

Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language; the
current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998 and
revised December 2002.

GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell.  Included is
an optimising compiler generating good code for a variety of
platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick
development.  The distribution includes space and time profiling
facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various
language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign
language interfaces (C, whatever).  GHC is distributed under a
BSD-style open source license.

A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries,
specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references,
contact information, links to research groups) are available from the
Haskell home page (see below).


On-line GHC-related resources
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:

GHC home page              http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
GHC developers' home page  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
Haskell home page          http://www.haskell.org/


Supported Platforms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them,
is here:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
difficulty.  The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a
new platform:

 
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/building/building-guide.html


Developers
~~~~~~~~~~

We welcome new contributors.  Instructions on accessing our source
code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are
available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


Mailing lists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
the web interfaces at

	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs

There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on
www.haskell.org; for the full list, see

	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/

GHC developers occasionally hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:

       http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

Please report bugs using our bug tracking system.  Instructions on
reporting bugs can be found here:
	
	http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug