Announcing the GHC Bug Sweep

[Simon Marlow]

Help us weed the GHC ticket database, and get a warm fuzzy feeling from 
contributing to Haskell core technology!

There are currently ~750 tickets against GHC.  Many of them have not 
been looked at in months or years.  Often when I go through old tickets 
I find easy targets: bugs that have already been fixed, duplicates, bugs 
that are not reproducible and the submitter has gone away.

So the idea we have is this: do an incremental sweep of the whole 
database, starting from the oldest tickets.  Check each one, and try to 
make some progress on it.  If we get enough momentum going we can make 
sure every ticket gets looked at every few months at the least.

This is a game for the whole family!  We don't care how much progress 
you make on each ticket, just as long as someone has taken a look and 
moved the ticket forward in some way.  For example, you might check for 
duplicates, update the metadata, ask for more information from the 
submitter, try to reproduce the bug against the latest version of GHC.

To claim a ticket all you have to do is remove it from the list on the 
wiki.  Full instructions are here

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/BugSweep

including a list of suggestions for ways to make progress on a ticket.

Cheers!

Simon & the GHC team