Thoughts on the Contributing page

[Ben Gamari]

Tobias Dammers <tdammers at gmail.com> writes:

> 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.

Agreed. The default in a clean checkout should remain perf.

However, it would be reasonable for the newcomers instructions to start
off with devel2. For most contributors working in compiler/ this is the
right default.

Cheers,

- Ben
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