Starting GHC development.

[Jan Stolarek]

When you see tests failing with validate I's suggest going to #ghc IRC channel and asking there. 
You're most likely to get an up-to-date answer.

Basically, when you're working on some changes in GHC I'd suggest to run ./validate on the master 
branch to see what (if any) tests are failing. When validating your changes you'll have to see 
whether your modifications introduced any new failures or not (or maybe fixed the existing ones). 
In any case I strongly suggest running the failing tests (both on master branch and on yours) to 
make sure that they fail in the same way.

Janek

Dnia niedziela, 12 stycznia 2014, Daniil Frumin napisał:
> Does anyone actually know which tests are supposed to fail on 'validate'?
>
> On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 10:43 PM, 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.
> >
> > 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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > ghc-devs mailing list
> > ghc-devs at haskell.org
> > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs