Starting GHC development.

[Mateusz Kowalczyk]

On 03/01/14 18:50, Gabor Greif wrote:
> 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
> 

While bumping the thread might help, I don't think people missing it is
always the case. Refer to Carter's recent e-mail about something very
important: when is 7.8 finally happening. It was pinged 9 days later by
Kazu and still no replies! In the end he had to make another thread
nearly half a month after his initial one and directly CC some people to
get any output…

I think it's more about ‘I'm not 100% sure here so I won't say anything’
which is terrible for newcomers because to them it seems like everyone
ignored their thread. For a newcomer, even ‘did you try make
maintainer-clean’ might be helpful. At least they don't feel ignored.

-- 
Mateusz K.