Thoughts on the Contributing page

[Julian Leviston]

> On 29 Jan 2019, at 8:14 pm, Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> The current Newcomers' Guide uses the current Makefile workflow, but
> this is on a fast track to deprecation - but then, I doubt Hadrian has
> seen enough exposure yet to use for a good beginner-friendly "Just
> Works" guide. I'm leaning towards sticking with make for now, also
> because existing material is already written this way; and then once
> Hadrian is truly ready for prime time, we can rewrite the relevant
> parts.
> 
> Thoughts?

As a recent newcomer, it’d be nice to have the option there as a link with a warning sign “here be dragons, but try this out if you’re interested”.
I tried it. It seems better than regular make already (I don’t have to guess at appropriate concurrency, for example, I just throw -j at it and it works it out assumedly because GHC can work out the number of capabilities), and it seems to work out which builds it needs to do next automatically.
Both those things - at least - are more beginner friendly than manually cloning the mk/build.mk file, running ./boot && ./configure && make -j8 then adjusting the mk/build.mk file again to get make to be faster.

So, FWIW, I say put the link on the page at the top as an alternative, mark it with a warning saying something along the lines of that it might not work, but it’s the future, and it’s simpler and easier if it does, and feel free to try it out, then fallback to make. There are plenty of sharp rocks for beginners, and ironically the existing make-based build system is probably one of them. (Having said that, it’s very helpful to know the stages of compilation, so hopefully whatever docs we arrive at will point the beginner to something explaining what’s going on as they do their first bootstrapping build, for the curious.

Julian