Mid 2022 Release Plans

Matthew Pickering - 2022-05-23

This post sets out our current plans for the upcoming releases in the next few months.

9.4.1

The next stage of the 9.4.1 release series (alpha2) will be released within the next few days. The main changes in alpha2 relative to alpha1 are improvements to the packaging and release process which have fixed a number of packaging bugs present in alpha1 due to moving to bindists built by hadrian.

The final 9.4.1 release is scheduled for late July.

The release manager for this release is Ben Gamari.

9.2.3

The 9.2.3 release is scheduled to immediately follow the 9.4.1-alpha1. This release fixes some packaging issues on Windows and a few bugs, notably:

  • a panic involving unbound cycle-breaker variables that prevented several libraries from compiling, such as massiv-io (#20231),
  • a typechecker regression in which GHC refused to use recursive equalities involving type families (#21473, #21515).

The release manager for this release is Zubin Duggal.

9.0.* series

We do not intend to produce any more releases in the 9.0.* series. From our perspective there are no serious bugs affecting the 9.0.2 release. It is advised that users start using the 9.2 series, which we intend to stabilise in the same manner as the 8.10 series. We have made this decision for the following reasons:

  • The 9.2 series does not contain significant breakage (when upgrading from 9.0)
  • Anecdotal evidence suggests that many companies are upgrading straight from 8.10.7 to 9.2.2 and skipping the 9.0.* releases.
  • We do not currently have capacity to manage 4 active branches.

Conclusion

This post summarises the latest state of the release cycles and our intent within the next few months. If you have any questions or comments then please post the next few months. If you have any questions or comments then please be in touch via mailto:ghc-devs@haskell.org.