GitHub pull requests

[Michael Snoyman]

On Sun, Oct 5, 2014 at 11:21 AM, Andreas Abel <abela at chalmers.se> wrote:

> On 05.10.2014 07:03, Ben Gamari wrote:
>
>> and yet aren't willing to take the five (twenty?) minutes to familiarize
>> themselves with Phabricator and the arc toolchain.
>>
>
> Are you serious about this?  I think your time estimate is a grand
> illusion.  I attended Joachim Breitner's talk about Phabricator at the GHC
> developer meeting, that already  (nearly?) used up the twenty minutes you
> allow.  Yet I still have to
>
> * try it the first time,
> * make sure I get everything right,
> * learn to *trust* the tool
>   * that is does the right thing,
>   * does not do anything bad to my files
>   * etc. pp.
>
> The brightest might be up to get on track in a couple of hours, but the
> majority is quite hesitant towards new tools...
>
> Human condition.
>
> Cheers,
> Andreas
>
> --
> Andreas Abel  <><      Du bist der geliebte Mensch.
>
> Department of Computer Science and Engineering
> Chalmers and Gothenburg University, Sweden
>
> andreas.abel at gu.se
> http://www2.tcs.ifi.lmu.de/~abel/
>
> _______________________________________________
> ghc-devs mailing list
> ghc-devs at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
>

I have to agree with Andreas here. I was in the boat of wanting to send a
pull request for a simple documentation fix. If I could have just sent a
Github PR, it would have taken no more than 5 minutes[1] to send a pull
request. And since it was pure documentation, I could have even done it
directly from the Github web interface if I'd wanted to. Phabricator took
me quite a bit longer to set up (I don't remember the exact time, but
certainly more than 20 minutes and certainly less than 3 hours). I also had
trouble figuring out the right way to get started on this, and had to bug
Herbert, who just sent me a link to the Phabricator site.

At the very least, I think accepting Github PRs would allow people in my
situation to send documentation fixes- which is something we should really
be encouraging[2]. If we're still going to require Phabricator, there
should be a canonical, step-by-step guide linked from multiple locations
(including a README.md on GHC's Github repo) to make it as obvious as
possible to willing contributors how to get started.

Michael

[1] Yes, I realize that's because I'm very familiar with the Github PR
process already. I'm not interested in whether Github or Phabricator are
easier for new users, the presumption is that many people- like me- are
already very familiar with Github.
[2]
http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/2i1z9u/improving_haskellrelated_documentation/
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20141005/7e0b1340/attachment.html>