[Haskell-cafe] starting GHC development -- two questions

[Ömer Sinan Ağacan]

Hi all,

I want to start working on GHC, I cloned the repo, made some trivial
changes(change some strings etc.) and re-built and observed the
results. Now I'll continue reading and understanding the source.

While doing this, I think one feature would greatly help me finding my
way through GHC source, which is huge: I want to see definition of
some symbols. Normally what I would do for this is to load source into
GHCi and run :info command. But in the case of GHC, even if it's
possible to load GHC into GHCi, I don't think it will be faster than
running "ack --haskell someSymbol" and searching through results
manually.

First idea came to my mind was to generate tags files and then
navigate from within vim(my editor of choice). tags file can be added
to Makefile as a goal and then tags can be regenerated after each
build. Did anyone else try this before?



My second question is do we have any low-hanging fruits in trac, to
help new people start contributing to GHC? I know several open source
projects using that approach and it's really helpful for beginners.

I just skimmed over trac and most issues look way too advanced for a starter.


Thanks in advance,


---
Ömer Sinan Ağacan
http://osa1.net