Starting GHC development.

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 03/01/14 13:27, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> [snip]
> Thank you.  We need lots of help!
> [snip]

While I hate to interrupt this thread, I think this is a good chance to
mention something.

I think the big issue for joining GHC development is the lack of
communication on the mailing list. There are many topics where a person
has a problem with GHC tree (can't validate/build, some tests are
failing), posts to GHC devs seeking help and never gets a reply. This is
very discouraging and often makes it outright impossible to contribute.

An easy example is the failing tests one: unfortunately some tests are
known to fail, but they are only known to fail to existing GHC devs. A
new person tries to validate clean tree, gets test failures, asks for
help on GHC devs, doesn't get any, gives up.

Is there any better way to get through than ghc-devs? Even myself I'd
love to get started but if I can't get help even getting the ‘clean’
tree to a state where I'm confident it's not a problem with my machine,
how am I to write patches for anything? A more serious example is that
the work I did over summer on Haddock still hasn't been pushed in. Why?
Because neither Simon Hengel nor myself can ensure that we haven't
broken anything as neither of use gets a clean validate. I have in fact
asked for help recently with this but to no avail and I do know Simon
also sought help in the past to no avail. I have also tried to join the
development quite a few months in the past now but due to failing tests
on validate and lack of help, I had to give up on that.

Please guys, try to increase responsiveness to posts on this list. It's
very easy to scroll down in your mail client and see just how many
threads never got a single reply.

-- 
Mateusz K.