What's the advantage to putting this in base instead of a separate
package? If it goes in base, it will make it more difficult to upgrade,
and take longer for this module to be adopted at all. If possible, I'd
opt for a standalone package.

I thought the idea was that we would try to point people towards using these as a best practice as opposed to using forkIO?

I find that a helper function to fork a child thread with error handling is something I'm always pasting into various projects [1], which I take as a sign it should be easily available. I never really thought about looking for better threads packages on hackage, because I didn't want to add an extra dependency (or deal with something big and complex). But if it were standard I would have picked it up!

-Ryan

[1] P.S. Non-sequitor: The other little helper function I'm ALWAYS pasting into files is a function to print large numbers with interspersed commas. I'd like to see THAT in the standard ;-), but I realize there are internationalization issues.