Vote for GHC 6.8 bugs!

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Friends,

We are gearing up towards at GHC 6.8 release.  You can see details of what will be in it in the GHC status report for April http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/April07.

One symptom of the sharply-increased use of GHC is the sharply-increased number of bug reports and feature requests.  We have no fewer than 200 milestoned for 6.8!  You can see a summary here:
        http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/roadmap

In reality we're unlikely to fix all 200, at least not without a lot of help from our friends.  Inevitably, we have to prioritise.  One way we do that is by using our (unreliable) perception of which bugs you (GHC's users) care about.  This message is to invite you to improve the accuracy of this perception, by voting for the bugs you care about.

We have just instituted a cheap-and-cheerful mechanism for voting.  Each bug has a 'cc' field.  To vote, just add your email address to the cc field!  Better still, add a note to say why you care, and/or add a test case.  We'll use the number of cc's (and an informal impression of any notes you've added) to guide our priorities.  Adding yourself to the cc list means you'll get mail whenever anyone modifies the Trac report, which keeps you informed of what's going on.

(You have to log in to edit Trac reports.  Currently, new accounts are disabled for boring spammy reasons.  That will be fixed when we upgrade Trac, but meanwhile, log in as guest, password guest.)

It's not a perfect system, but we think it'll give useful extra guidance.  So please go ahead and vote.

But better still, help us fix bugs!  GHC is open-source software, and it has a very large "surface area" (many platforms, many libraries, many features, documentation, tools, etc etc).   Lots of people help make GHC good -- please join in (see the "Joining in" list in the GHC Wiki sidebar http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/)

thanks

Simon