Starting GHC development.

[Simon Marlow]

On 03/01/2014 18:43, Mateusz Kowalczyk 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.

Personally I only just read your question about validating Haddock.  I 
didn't know the answer, but I would have suggested a few things to try - 
it looks like your local package database has some broken packages, 
perhaps.  I'm not sure what the "post-testsuite package check" is, so I 
would have to go and look.

Generally, the following things might help if you get no answer on the 
mailing list:

  - ask in #ghc
  - search the ticket database (Google with 'site:ghc.haskell.org')
  - poke around in the code yourself

There are not supposed to be any failing tests in validate.  If there 
are, it is a bug: see if someone else has reported it, and if not, 
report it yourself.

Thanks for trying to make GHC better.  There are gaps in our support 
infrastructure, which is unfortunate but typical for an open source 
project, so sometimes you might have to fix something that wasn't on 
your critical path.  Rest assured that we're very grateful when people 
do this!

Cheers,
Simon