Re: Starting GHC development.

On 03/01/14 18:50, Gabor Greif wrote:

On 1/3/14, Mateusz Kowalczyk wrote:

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On 03/01/14 13:27, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

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[snip] Thank you. We need lots of help! [snip]

While I hate to interrupt this thread, I think this is a good chance to mention something.

I think the big issue for joining GHC development is the lack of communication on the mailing list. There are many topics where a person has a problem with GHC tree (can't validate/build, some tests are failing), posts to GHC devs seeking help and never gets a reply. This is very discouraging and often makes it outright impossible to contribute.

An easy example is the failing tests one: unfortunately some tests are known to fail, but they are only known to fail to existing GHC devs. A new person tries to validate clean tree, gets test failures, asks for help on GHC devs, doesn't get any, gives up.

We should explicitly say somewhere that pinging for an answer is okay. Sometimes the key persons (for a potential answer) are out of town or too busy, and the question gets buried.

Repeating the answer a few days later raises awareness and has higher chance to succeed. This is how other technical lists (e.g. LLVM's) work.

Cheers,

Gabor

While bumping the thread might help, I don't think people missing it is always the case. Refer to Carter's recent e-mail about something very important: when is 7.8 finally happening. It was pinged 9 days later by Kazu and still no replies! In the end he had to make another thread nearly half a month after his initial one and directly CC some people to get any output… I think it's more about ‘I'm not 100% sure here so I won't say anything’ which is terrible for newcomers because to them it seems like everyone ignored their thread. For a newcomer, even ‘did you try make maintainer-clean’ might be helpful. At least they don't feel ignored. -- Mateusz K.