Status updates

[Austin Seipp]

Hello *,

Here are some notes from what's happened this week:

 - I've rejiggered some of the wiki pages a bit more, including
updating the BugTracker page[1], Phabricator/Harbormaster docs[2],
   -- The bugtracker page mostly saw some minor updates in relation to
the updates from *last* week; notably the new 'upstream' status.
   -- I split the Phabricator page up a bit to be easier to read, so
Harbormaster is its own page now (but see more below).

 - I spent a day or two working on a Windows buildbot for Phabricator.
Good news: I think I have a reliable set of steps to get a windows SSH
instance running. However, I have not yet gotten it to build GHC
through msys2, so it's not working yet.

 - I spent time on Friday getting a fix for #7602 ready for real this
time. I'll put a review on Phabricator soon (my other machine doesn't
have `arc` credentials.) Hopefully OS X users can soon rejoice with a
solid performance boost.

 - I fiddled with Applicative-Monad a tiny bit, but haven't made much
progress still. Like last time, it would be really amazing if anyone
would like to help me out and try the patch yourself (feel free to
email/IRC, or see last weeks' email for more).

Other things:

 - Thomas Miedema helped out Herbert by writing a Trac anti-spam
plugin for us - Thank you so much Thomas!! Hopefully the spam will go
away soon.

 I am not yet sure if Thomas's new plugin is installed yet - Herbert?

Upcoming:

 - #7602 will go up for review.

 - I will land D165 today probably since it's ready and other
refactorings can come later. D166 (faster copies) is not yet ready.

 - I haven't done this yet, but I'm going to try to turn on `--slow`
./validate mode in the next day or two for Phabricator. At first, I'm
only going to configure this for *commits* first, and perhaps patches
will follow once we have more build machines.

 That means Phabricator is going to start annoying you with consistent
failures (I think `--slow` has a few right now), but putting on
pressure is the best way to fix it, I think. I'll send another email
about this shortly.

 - I will probably rejigger the Phabricator page again to be smaller.
I've had some complaints it's getting a bit large (due to the images,
mostly), so I'll probably move the hierarchy around a bit.

 - Sit down and do some thorough code review. We have about 3 major
features sitting on Phabricator at the moment which are going to need
extensive review before landing. I expect this will take a while. See:
  -- D169, source code notes: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D169
  -- D168: Partial type sigs: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D168
  -- D119: StaticValues extension: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D119

Please please please - feel free to review these patches! Even if they
are not your area of expertise, doing so will A) help you learn more
hopefully! and B) you can surely help still (pointing out typos,
needed docs, lint violations, suggestions) etc. That would be really
useful to help increase the 'shared ownership' we all have, I think.

[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/WorkingConventions/BugTracker
[2] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Phabricator/Harbormaster

-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/