6.6 plans and status

[Simon Marlow]

Hi folks,

The Hackathon, ICFP and Haskell Workshop are fast approaching, and we promised 
to have 6.6 out before then.  This means we're on a pretty tight schedule, and 
some corners will have to be cut in order to get there.  But that may not be a 
bad thing - without hard deadlines the release can easily drag on.

So we propose the following schedule for the release:

   Release candidate: 25 August
   Release:           8 September

giving me a couple of days before I have to fly out to Portland in case of 
serious mishaps in the release.

6.6 will be an alpha-quality release, mainly because we won't have time to fix 
all the bugs in the database currently scheduled for 6.6.  However, we do expect 
it to pass the vast majority of the testsuite, and for most uses it'll work 
fine.  We do expect to see more than the usual amount of churn between 6.6 and 
6.6.1 while we shake things down, though.

Before the release we will be focussing on things that can't be deferred until 
6.6.1, and that means API changes (because patchlevels don't modify APIs).  But 
we'll also be redefining the core set of packages that come with GHC, so the API 
stability will be restricted to just these:

  base, haskell98, template-haskell, readline, Cabal, unix, Win32

We will probably still ship binary distributions with more packages (at the 
option of the distribution builder), but in general other packages should be 
considered independent of GHC.  You'll be able to upgrade them separately from GHC.

I'm aware we still possibly have threading-related problems on MacOS X, Solaris 
and FreeBSD.  We'll do our best to sort these out before the release, but we 
can't hold up the release for them.

We could really use some help.  In particular, I'd like to see test reports for 
platforms that we don't have run nightly builds on.  If you have the time to 
take one of the 6.6 bugs, please go ahead:

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.6&order=priority

If you plan to look into a bug, either assign it to yourself (if you have a 
developer account on the Trac), or else drop us a note saying so.

I'll be going through the bug list and prioritising in the next day or two. 
Many of these bugs will be pushed back to 6.6.1.

Cheers,
	Simon