Thoughts on the Contributing page

[Tobias Dammers]

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 03:01:24PM +0000, Matthew Pickering wrote:
> Whilst we're at it, is there any consensus to make the default build
> settings more friendly to developers?
> 
> The default is still perf which takes a very long time. devel2 would
> be an appropriate choice I think for newcomers.

The way I wrote it right now is that for the very first build, you use
whatever default GHC ships with, just to make sure you succeed in making
a clean build on a pristine checkout. After that, I do recommend using
the "devel2" flavour.

I do believe that release build settings should be the default though,
simply because of the "install from source" use case. Aspiring GHC
hackers will have to learn how to configure the build anyway, might as
well teach them right away.