Hi folks, The Hackathon, ICFP and Haskell Workshop are fast approaching, and we promised to have 6.6 out before then. This means we're on a pretty tight schedule, and some corners will have to be cut in order to get there. But that may not be a bad thing - without hard deadlines the release can easily drag on. So we propose the following schedule for the release: Release candidate: 25 August Release: 8 September giving me a couple of days before I have to fly out to Portland in case of serious mishaps in the release. 6.6 will be an alpha-quality release, mainly because we won't have time to fix all the bugs in the database currently scheduled for 6.6. However, we do expect it to pass the vast majority of the testsuite, and for most uses it'll work fine. We do expect to see more than the usual amount of churn between 6.6 and 6.6.1 while we shake things down, though. Before the release we will be focussing on things that can't be deferred until 6.6.1, and that means API changes (because patchlevels don't modify APIs). But we'll also be redefining the core set of packages that come with GHC, so the API stability will be restricted to just these: base, haskell98, template-haskell, readline, Cabal, unix, Win32 We will probably still ship binary distributions with more packages (at the option of the distribution builder), but in general other packages should be considered independent of GHC. You'll be able to upgrade them separately from GHC. I'm aware we still possibly have threading-related problems on MacOS X, Solaris and FreeBSD. We'll do our best to sort these out before the release, but we can't hold up the release for them. We could really use some help. In particular, I'd like to see test reports for platforms that we don't have run nightly builds on. If you have the time to take one of the 6.6 bugs, please go ahead: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=new&status=assigned&status=reopened&milestone=6.6&order=priority If you plan to look into a bug, either assign it to yourself (if you have a developer account on the Trac), or else drop us a note saying so. I'll be going through the bug list and prioritising in the next day or two. Many of these bugs will be pushed back to 6.6.1. Cheers, Simon