[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.4.1-alpha3 available

[Ben Gamari]

The GHC development team is pleased to announce the third and likely
last alpha release leading up to GHC 8.4.1. The usual release artifacts
are available from

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.1-alpha3

Due to user demand we now offer a binary distribution for 64-bit
Fedora 27, which links against ncurses6. This is in contrast to the
Debian 8 distribution, which links against ncurses5. Users of newer
distributions (Fedora 27, Debian Sid) should use this new Fedora 27
distribution.

Also due to user demand we have reintroduced compatibility with GCC 4.4,
which earlier alphas had dropped due to #14244.

Note that this release is still affected by #14675, wherein the compiler
will segmentation fault when built with some Ubuntu toolchains. We are
actively working to identify the cause and hope that this will be
resolved before the final release.


=== Notes on release scheduling ===

The 8.4.1 release marks the first release where GHC will be adhering to
its new, higher-cadence release schedule [1]. Under this new scheme,
major releases will be made in 6-month intervals with interstitial minor
releases as necessary.

In order to minimize the likelihood of schedule slippage and to ensure
adequate testing, each major release will be preceded by a number of
regular alpha releases. We will begin issuing these releases roughly
three months before the final date of the major release and will issue
roughly one every two weeks during this period. This high release
cadence will allow us to quickly get fixes into users' hands and
more quickly identify potential issues.

As always, do let us know if you encounter any trouble in the course of
testing. Thanks for your help!

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog/2017-release-schedule
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