Oh, and I don't know where Joyent announced this news - it certainly wasn't on their blog... and the article doesn't provide any source. The only time I saw anyone mention anything about 0.8's release date, was here: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/nodejs/aRC2pbFN8NU/YXpB_vuCT...
Node.js 0.8 sounds great, though I'm afraid there will again be a long period where many of your NPM dependencies are simply broken, especially with the new build tool for native modules:
compiling & debugging native libs in node 0.7 is vastly easier, so I'm happy that 0.8 will be here soon. Previously you'd get a pretty generic hardcoded error message about failure to compile/link and it wouldn't be obvious what was the underlying issue. Also, gyp is a lot easier to use than waf -- it just generates the makefiles that are used to do the compilation.
The solution was to compile in 0.7 to see the error, then go back to 0.6 to make the module.
(I'll also mention I haven't run into any native compatibility issues between 0.6 & 0.7 yet)
We had a really craptastic time trying (and failing) to debug what seems to be race conditions in waf (it uses two workers by default, and they get deadlocked intermittently when doing build jobs). So I look forward to at least getting that sorted out by way of node abandoning waf.
"API changes between v0.6 and v0.8" : https://github.com/joyent/node/wiki/API-changes-between-v0.6...