RFC: Phabricator for patches and code review

[Austin Seipp]

No, at the moment Phabricator is not integrated with any testing
functionality. It could be, but that would be a bit of work I think to
integrate with GHC's ./validate process. It would be nice to have
long-term, however, but I don't think it's necessary right now - I run
./validate before every push out anyway just in case.

If you do need a machine to help run builds, a recommendation: sign up
for AWS. A GHC build can be done in < 1hr on those machines, and an
x1.xlarge for example would cost you about .28c USD to run for that
period. It's less than optimal, but I'm not the only one who has
resorted to this on less-than-adequate machines...

Another recommendation is to make sure you've got the right build
settings, which can have a pretty dramatic impact on build times. See
here: https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Hacking and also
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/Using#HowtomakeGHCbuildquickly

On Fri, Jun 6, 2014 at 3:13 AM, Ömer Sinan Ağacan <omeragacan at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2014-06-06 7:05 GMT+03:00 Austin Seipp <austin at well-typed.com>:
>>  2) Phabricator in particular makes it very easy to submit patches for
>> review. To submit a patch, I just run the command 'arc diff' and it
>> Does The Right Thing. It also makes it easy to ensure people are
>> *alerted* when a patch might be relevant to them.
>
> This sounds really good. I was thinking about sending an email about
> this for a while now. I'm reading some parts of GHC and there are lots
> of small patches I'd like to submit for reviews. Most of the time
> these are <10 lines of changes. But trac makes everything so hard and
> the interface is so horrible, I'm ending up not sending the patch.
> Also, testing is a huge problem for me. I can't test GHC on my
> laptop(which is my only development environment) because it takes
> forever to finish.
>
> With something like Github and a CI server(Jenkins/Travis/whatever)
> integrated to the Github repository that runs tests on pull request,
> it would be super easy for new contributors to submit small patches.
>
> As far as I can understand(altough currently I can't see how to send a
> patch) Phabricator helps sending pull requests/patches, but does it
> help with testing too?
>
> ---
> Ömer Sinan Ağacan
> http://osa1.net
>



-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/