The first Shaking up GHC release

We are happy to announce that the Shaking up GHC project has finally reached the first milestone.

There is still a long way until we can match the capabilities of the current build system. At the moment we only build vanilla way. Validation, documentation, build flavours and cross-compilation are not yet implemented. Known limitations are listed here: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc#current-limitations.

The purpose of this release is to attract alpha testers and collect early feedback across multiple platforms and build configurations. We already have several success reports on Linux, OS X, Solaris and Windows. However, things will inevitably break and we hope to catch and fix as many of these cases as possible with your help. The instructions on how to try the new build system can be found here: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc#your-first-build.

We plan to be ready to become a part of the GHC tree around 1 March 2016, and catch up with the make build system around 1 June 2016. The dates are tentative and depend on how much time it takes us to resolve the remaining issues: https://github.com/snowleopard/shaking-up-ghc/milestones.