GHC development asks too much of the host system

[George Colpitts]

Great idea, Ben. It would also make getting started less intimidating
particularly if it had sections on changing the doc and adding test cases.
The latter areas would be a good way for non experts to help move ghc
forward. Of course those processes would ideally not involve building ghc.
Less expert software developers are experts on what needs more
explanation for less sophisticated developers  in e.g. the  hackage doc.
Similarly many people who submit bugs can't fix them but they could write a
test case.

On Wed, Jul 20, 2022 at 1:01 PM Ben Gamari <ben at smart-cactus.org> wrote:

> Rodrigo Mesquita <rodrigo.m.mesquita at gmail.com> writes:
>
> > Dear Ben,
> >
> > The list of tips you put together is quite nice.
> >
> > I suggest we add it to hadrian’s wiki page under a “Tips for making
> > your life easier” section (as is, it is already useful! at least I
> > learned something new).
> >
> Hi Rodrigo,
>
> I'm happy to hear that it was useful! Indeed I always struggle to know
> where to put this information; our developer documentation is quite
> scattered and it's hard to know where new contributors will enter it.
> Nevertheless, the page that you mention seems like an obvious place for
> these tips.
>
> Incidentally, I have long felt that migrating the Wiki documentation
> into a comprehensive developer's guide (see #18853) in the repository
> (much like the Rustc Book [1]) would be a useful direction of travel. It
> would be both prompt us review (and, in some cases, retire) existing and
> give us the opportunity to structure the documentation in a more
> coherent manner. Moreover, the fact that it would be part of the
> repository would both give us the benefit of code review and make it
> easier to ensure that the documentation remains consistent with the
> code. This is obviously a longer-term goal, but one which it would be
> great to have help in moving towards.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
>
> [1] https://doc.rust-lang.org/rustc/contributing.html
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