| This response has gotten pretty long! Apologies if I missed something,
| or otherwise misunderstood. Anyway, if there's a path here that seems
| sensible, I'll have a go at it.
William, I am not qualified to comment on the details, but thank you for offering to help. I do urge you to pick some initial tasks that *don't* involve solving the full cross-compilation problem, desirable as it is. I fear that it is a swamp from which you will not emerge soon, and it'd be better to have some successes to encourage you, and some experience to build on, before diving into it.
Everyone: no responses yet to my email below. Suppose Austin plays secretary: would people like to volunteer to be part of the GHC Nightly-Build/Continuous-Integration Task Force?
Simon
-----Original Message-----
From: Simon Peyton Jones
Sent: 18 June 2014 23:48
To: Simon Peyton Jones; Páli Gábor János; Alain O'Dea
Cc: ghc-devs@haskell.org; William Knop; Karel Gardas
Subject: RE: Offering GHC builder build slaves
Back in April I said:
| Seriously, I advertised a couple of weeks ago for help with our
| nightly- build infrastructure. Quite a few people responded -- thank
| you very much.
|
| So we have willing horsepower. But the moment we lack leadership.
| Alain rightly says "I don't know what the process is" because we don't
| *have* a process. We need a mechanism for creating a process, taking
| decisions, etc.
|
| I think what is needed is:
|
| * A group of people willing to act as a kind of committee. That
| could be everyone who replied. You could create a mailing list,
| or (initially better) just chat on ghc-devs. But it would be
| useful to have a list of who is involved.
|
| * Someone (or a couple of people) to play the role of chair.
| That doesn't mean an autocrat... it means someone who gently pushes
| discussions to a conclusion, and says "I propose that we do X".
|
| * Then the group can formulate a plan and proceed with it.
| For example, should Pali's efforts be "blessed"? I don't
| know enough to know, but you guys do.
|
| In my experience, people are often unwilling to put themselves forward
| as chair, not because they are unwilling, but because they feel it'd
| be "pushy". So I suggest this: if you think (based on the traffic
| you've
| seen) that X would be a chair you'd trust, suggest them.
|
| In short: power to the people! GHC is your compiler.
Since then various people have done various things, but so far as I know we don't have any of the three "*" items above. The people who seem in principle willing to help include Joachim Breitner