GHC-7.8 warning on rules that may not fire

[Henning Thielemann]

With GHC-7.8 I get lots of warnings like

src/Foo/Bar.hs:215:6: Warning:
     Rule "foo" may never fire
       because ‘bar’ might inline first
     Probable fix: add an INLINE[n] or NOINLINE[n] pragma on ‘bar’

So far I thought that rewrite RULES always have precedence to INLINE. 
Has this changed? I hesitate to follow the advice of adding phase 
numbers in bracket because I consider these phase numbers a quite 
fragile and non-modular solution (like precedence numbers for infix 
operators).

I have found:
    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Plugins/Phases

Is this still considered for future developments?