Starting GHC development.

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

Friends

Happy new year!

About GHC 7.8, I apologise for the lack of communication. I was on holiday from 10 Dec, and replied when I got back after Christmas. I had a good conversation with Austin last Friday, and I expect an email from him to ghc-devs sometime today, to say what tasks remain, and when he expects to be able to cut a release candidate.

More generally, I very much sympathise with Mateusz's original observation that it's discouraging to email ghc-devs about something, and get no reply.

It's a classic problem with a large open-source project, run entirely by volunteers.  There is literally no one whose day job is to maintain GHC, except Austin, and even he is not superman. So if you email and get no reply it may just be that no one knows the answer, at least not without digging.

What's the solution? Certainly ping after a few days, as Gabor says. (Sometimes people wait to see if someone knows The Answer, and a ping will then elicit some "well maybe you could try this" half-answers.) Failing that, just roll up your sleeves and start digging!  Maybe you will become the expert in that area and will soon be answering questions yourself.

If anyone has better ideas, do contribute them. 

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces at haskell.org] On Behalf Of
| Mateusz Kowalczyk
| Sent: 03 January 2014 19:15
| Cc: ghc-devs at haskell.org
| Subject: Re: Starting GHC development.
| 
| 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.
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