[GHC DevOps Group] Can't push to haddock

Wed Dec 20 01:47:00 UTC 2017

I think, what Sven is getting at here —and I do have to say, I concur— is that there is a bit of NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome in parts of the Haskell community. I think, part of it is just inertia and the desire to keep things the same, because that is easier and more familiar.

One aspect that complicates this discussion significantly is that GHC dev has developed certain work arounds and ways of doing things, where third party infrastructure seems lacking in features, because it doesn’t support all these quirks. However, it turns out that if we are only prepared to change our workflow and processes to align with modern software development practices, many of theses ”features” aren’t actually necessary. We have seen quite a bit of that in the CI discussion. 

I am not writing this to blame anything or anybody. I think, it is a normal part of a healthy process of change. However, it complicates the discussion as people get hung up on individual technicalities, such as this or that feature is missing, without considering the big picture.

Generally, I think, a worthwhile golden rule in ops is that custom infrastructure is bad. It creates extra work, technical debt, and failure points. So, IMHO the default ought to be to use 3rd part infrastructure (like GitHub) and only augment that where absolutely necessary. This will simply leave us with more time to write Haskell code in GHC instead of building, maintaining, and supporting GHC infrastructure. 

Cheers,
Manuel

> 19.12.2017 20:47 Simon Peyton Jones via ghc-devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>:
> 
> It seems to me that there is some hostility towards GitHub in GHC HQ, but I don't really understand why. GitHub serves other similar projects quite well, e.g. Rust, and I can't see why we should be special.
> 
> Speaking for myself, I have no hostility towards GitHub, and there is no GHC-HQ bias against it that I know of.  If it serves the purpose better, we should use it.   Indeed that’s why I asked my original question.  I agree with your point that data may actually be safer in GitHub than in our own repo.   (And there is nothing to stop a belt-and-braces mirror backup system.)
>  
> The issue is: does GitHub serve the purpose better?   We have frequently debated this multi-dimensional question.  And we should continue to do so: the answers may change over time (GitHub’s facilities are not static; and its increasing dominance is itself a cultural familiarity factor that simply was not the case five years ago).
>  
> Simon
>  
> From: Sven Panne [mailto:svenpanne at gmail.com] 
> Sent: 19 December 2017 09:30
> To: Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel at gmail.com>
> Cc: Simon Peyton Jones <simonpj at microsoft.com>; ghc-devs at haskell.org Devs <ghc-devs at haskell.org>
> Subject: Re: Can't push to haddock
>  
> 2017-12-19 9:50 GMT+01:00 Herbert Valerio Riedel <hvriedel at gmail.com <mailto:hvriedel at gmail.com>>:
> 
> We'd need mirroring anyway, as we want to keep control over our
> infrastructure and not have to trust a 3rd party infrastructure to
> safely handle our family jewels: GHC's source tree.
> 
>  
> 
> I think this is a question of perspective: Having the master repository on GitHub doesn't mean you are in immediate danger or lose your "family jewels". IMHO it's quite the contrary: I'm e.g. sure that in case that something goes wrong with GitHub, there is far more manpower behind it to fix that than for any self-hosted repository. And you can of course have some mirror of your GitHub repo in case of e.g. an earthquake/meteor/... in the San Francisco area... ;-)
> 
>  
> 
> It seems to me that there is some hostility towards GitHub in GHC HQ, but I don't really understand why. GitHub serves other similar projects quite well, e.g. Rust, and I can't see why we should be special.
> 
>  
> 
> Also, catching bad commits "a bit later" is just asking for trouble --
> by the time they're caught the git repos have already lost their
> invariant and its a big mess to recover;
> 
>  
> 
> This is by no means different than saying: "I want to run 'validate' in the commit hook, otherwise it's a big mess." We don't do this for obvious reasons, and what is the "big mess" if there is some incorrect submodule reference for a short time span? How is that different from somebody introducing e.g. a subtle compiler bug in a commit?
> 
>  
> 
> the invariant I devised and
> whose validation I implemented 4 years ago has served us pretty well,
> and has ensured that we never glitched into incorrectness; I'm also not
> sure why it's being suggested to switch to a less principled and more
> fragile scheme now. [...]
> 
>  
> 
> Because the whole repository structure is overly complicated and simply hosting everything on GitHub would simplify things. Again: I'm well aware that there are tradeoffs involved, but I would really appreciate simplifications. I have the impression that the entry barrier to GHC development has become larger and larger over the years, partly because of very non-standard tooling, partly because of the increasingly arcane repository organization. There are reasons that other projects like Rust attract far more developers... :-/
> 
> </GrumpyMode>
> 
>  
> 
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