Alas 2.8 is not likely to get fixes for this sort of thing. This issue has certainly been fixed, as I mentioned.
Did someone from your group call and leave a voicemail about this thread? It was not easy to make out their email address from their message (but it was a gmail address) and they seemed to mention this thread. They said they had compiler output after upgrading, but were getting an error which they provided an incomplete description of. If that was on this issue, could you post the output of the compiler here if you would like help getting through compilation issues?