Priorities for 6.10

[Simon Marlow]

Hi folks,

While I was away last week I jotted down a list of priorities for 6.10.  Some of these are in the bug tracker and some aren't, but I think it'd be a good idea for us to first discuss what we really want to see happen in the 6.10 time frame and then update the ticket database to match.

These are things that still need to be done, as opposed to big improvements already in the code base (e.g. type families).

 * Back-end rewrite, remove mangler (see also #1501)
 * shared libraries (#1876)
 * parallel GC (close #1589, #2185)
 * Haddock 2 (see also #1964 (GHC.Prim), #2335 (build problem))
 * Unicode encoding/decoding for Text I/O handles.  Consensus was that Text I/O should always use
   the current locale encoding.
 * Put in place a robust solution to the backwards-compatibility problem
 * Extensible exceptions
 * More library reorganisation
 * binary package DB, or at least make the one-file-per-package work (#723, #2089)
 * ^C should raise an exception by default (also SIGPIPE, see #1619)

Please circulate any additional items you can think of.  I'm working on getting the parallel GC in now, and I've started looking at Unicode support in Handles, meanwhile I'm thinking about the backwards-compatibility problem.

Cheers,
        Simon