[GHC DevOps Group] Looking back and into the future

[Manuel Chakravarty]

Dear GHC DevOps Group,

It has been rather quite here for a while. Hence, I’d like to take a moment to look at the goals that we formulated in the past and ask for input for the future.

If we are looking at the inaugural document of this group

  https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/dev-ops-group-charter

then it lists two initial goals: (a) moving to timely half-yearly releases and (b) lowering the barrier to entry for GHC contributors.

We do now have a steady half-yearly release cycle and we have improved accessibility to the project by way of the move to GitLab. As part of this process, we have improved the CI infrastructure considerably. While not everything may be perfect, I personally think, we are in a much better position than when we launched the GHC DevOps effort. This is, of course, due to the tireless effort of Ben and many others who did the required technical work.

Having said this, I am especially interested in hearing your opinion on two major questions:

(1) How happy are you with the new status quo? What works for you and what doesn’t? How can we improve release management, CI, and the whole GitLab experience further?

(2) What are the biggest obstacles for you in deploying and developing GHC? What should we aim to do next?

Furthermore, I know that some companies are making very significant contributions to the development of GHC (by assigning engineers to work on specific contributions). I would like to make this more visible. This is good PR for the companies, which I believe we owe them for their investment. And it is also good PR for GHC, because it shows that there is very serious commercial support for the project, which in turn is good when talking to cooperations, which are considering adopting Haskell. What do you think?

Cheers,
Manuel