[Haskell-cafe] Announce: Haskell Platform 8.0.1

[Gershom B]

On behalf of the Haskell Platform team, I'm happy to announce the release of

Haskell Platform 8.0.1

Now available at

https://www.haskell.org/platform/

This platform includes features initially planned in the "Improving
the 'Get Haskell Experience'" proposal of June 2015. [1]

   * Minimal as well as Full distributions. The minimal distribution
only includes GHC core libraries as well as additional tools. This is
now the recommended distribution. The Full distribution remains an
option for those who want a one-step installer with the broader set of
platform libraries preinstalled.

   * Inclusion of the Stack tool for developing Haskell projects [2]

Other highlights of this release include the following

   * The new cabal 1.24 including the great "new-build" tech preview
of nix-like build dependency management [3]

   * On windows, a cabal/msys setup that allows packages such as
"network" to build "out of the box". (almost*)

   * At long last, prebuilt Linux 32 bit platform installers

Changes to Contents:

   * Some packages have been removed from the installed packages set
(both minimal and full) including old-locale, old-time, cgi, and the
transitive cgi dependencies: transformers-compat, multipart, and
exceptions.

   * fixed has been added to the platform as a transitive dependency of GLUT.

A full list of contents is available at
https://www.haskell.org/platform/contents.html

Thanks to all the contributors to this release, thanks to all the
package and tool maintainers and authors, and a big thanks to the GHC
team for putting together such an exciting new compiler release!

A fuller list of new GHC changes is available at:
https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2016-May/012098.html

A fuller list of new cabal changes is available at:
http://coldwa.st/e/blog/2016-05-04-Cabal-1-24.html

Happy Haskell Hacking all,
Gershom

[1] http://projects.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-platform/2015-July/003129.html
[2] http://haskellstack.org
[3] http://blog.ezyang.com/2016/05/announcing-cabal-new-build-nix-style-local-builds/

* To build "network" and other msys-dependent packages on windows, you
will need to augment your cabal config file with the following lines:

extra-prog-path: C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\8.0.1\msys\usr\bin
extra-lib-dirs: C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\8.0.1\mingw\lib
extra-include-dirs: C:\Program Files\Haskell Platform\8.0.1\mingw\include