ANNOUNCE: GHC 6.8.1 Second Release Candidate

[Ian Lynagh]

We are pleased to announce the Second Release Candidate phase for GHC 6.8.1.

The 6.8.1 release is very close now. We only intend to look at the bugs
listed here:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.8.1&order=priority

so if you think there is something important that is not listed there
then this is the time to shout!

You can get 6.8.1 snapshots to test from here:

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

Right now we have the source bundles:

http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/ghc-6.8.0.20071015-src.tar.bz2
http://www.haskell.org/ghc/dist/stable/dist/ghc-6.8.0.20071015-src-extralibs.tar.bz2

Only the first of these is necessary.  The "extralibs" package contains
various extra packages that are sometimes supplied with GHC - unpack the
extralibs tarball on top of the source tree to add them, they will be
included in the build automatically.

There are also binary distributions for x86_64/Linux and i386/Linux,
and an installer for Windows.

Please test as much as possible, bugs are much cheaper if we find them
before the release!

We expect to release later this month.


Thanks
Ian, on behalf of the GHC team