Guile 2.1.8 on 9 March / 2.2.0 on 16 March

[Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com>]

Hi,

An update on Guile 2.2 status.  As I mentioned in a previous mail, I
think the master branch is good to go.  I spent some time over the last
week going over bugs; I have looked at all bugs in our database (!),
fixed a number of them (check https://debbugs.gnu.org/rrd/guile.html!),
and I think from those bugs I have no release blockers.  I am a little
behind on guile-devel still but hope to catch up shortly; that's my only
remaining backlog.

I have forward-ported all appropriate patches from 2.0 except the
reproducible-build patches.  I am hoping Ludovic will take that up :)
So we are caught up there as well.

There are still the release blocker discussions ongoing: foreign
objects, macro-introduced toplevel identifiers, and GOOPS incompatible
changes.

I think though that we are looking pretty good for a final 2.1.8
prerelease on 9 March (in 1 week).  Then we can let people build it, fix
any build errors, try it out on various platforms or whatever, and get
out a 2.2.0 on 16 March.

I would point people to hydra tarballs to test but it seems we broke
Hydra with the dist-lzip patch :)  I reverted that patch on both
branches and hopefully we have new disted tarballs for checking in a few
hours.

Finally for the release we should consider publicity -- what do we do?
Anything special?  Volunteers are welcome here.  The NEWS is quite
verbose, so condensing it into a set of 5-10 big-ticket items could be
useful; dunno.

Maybe we can use this as an opportunity to get people to try Guix
actually -- if we cut a 2.2.0 tarball a day before and get it into Guix
and get guile-next built, perhaps we could offer a binary installation
option for people on GNU machines (via Guix).  Dunno; thoughts here are
welcome.

OK, that's all from me.  Happy hacking :)

Andy