Thanks Simon for confirming the status.
Short: I see no reason not to proceed with 7.8.1 in the next HP.
Long:
On Mon, Mar 31, 2014 at 2:44 AM, Chris Dornan
I would have expected 7.8.1 will need some work before it is ready for the platform and holding up 7.8.1 further seems like a bad idea, so isn’t 7.8.2 the first real 7.8 candidate for the platform?
This has been a common sentiment here. But I believe that 7.8.1, and GHC in general, is being released with due diligence toward stability on all three major OS platforms. I don't expect to see this release, or any GHC release going forward that immediately needs to be retracted, or breaks for many users, or should be avoided. Of course GHC will ship with bugs - all large software does. We cannot ever wait for a bug-free release. Or even "relatively bug-free" or "no show stoppers" release, because with this many developers, maintainers, committers, and just sheer volume of code, we will never all agree here on the platform team what constitutes those states. If we start delaying for some unknown future release... we'll be waiting for 7.8.3 and 7.8.4, etc... We must trust that the GHC team will triage bugs and release when ready. With software this big, we all have a responsibility to stable and dependable releases. - Mark