Starting GHC development.

[Gabor Greif]

On 1/3/14, Mateusz Kowalczyk <fuuzetsu at fuuzetsu.co.uk> wrote:
> 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.

We should explicitly say somewhere that pinging for an answer is okay.
Sometimes the key persons (for a potential answer) are out of town or
too busy, and the question gets buried.

Repeating the answer a few days later raises awareness and has higher
chance to succeed. This is how other technical lists (e.g. LLVM's)
work.

Cheers,

    Gabor

>
> 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.
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