ANNOUNCE: GHC 6.8.1 Second Release Candidate

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| - the list of outstanding issues for 6.8 branch is suspiciously long. has
|     this been reviewed in detail?

Good point, Claus.  Lots of people are using GHC for lots of things.  This is a nice problem to have!  But it does lead to lots of bug reports.  We have limited resources, so we have to decide how best to spend them.  In this case we have not reviewed the 6.8 list "in detail" because we thought it was more important to fix the ones that we knew were important.

A major reason for Ian's announcement is that we'd like to give everyone an opportunity to say "this one is really important to me".  We certainly might have missed ones that actually are important.

We also started the "add yourself to the cc list" mechanism, to enable the community to say which bugs are important to them.

| several of the tickets look more or less
|     fixed, and there seems to be nothing standing in the way for fixing
|     some more, such as this one:
|     http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/1226

We would absolutely love help from you or anyone else to verify that the ones that are more or less fixed are indeed fixed; and to fix ones for which there is nothing standing in the way.

Simon