Great. We're open to ideas, and I think everyone will be happy to help make this work. One possible model worth emulating would be some sort of ghc and related projects analogue of this week In rust. http://cmr.github.io/blog/2013/10/28/this-week-in-rust/ eg summarizing what's been committed that week that may be interesting etc. On Friday, January 3, 2014, Howard B. Golden wrote:

Herbert,

A revived blog would be great as well, if the Simons and other devs have time to write it. I certainly don't know enough to write it myself, but I can collate what others are talking about and maybe agreeing about on the mailing list. I think what I can produce would work better as wiki entries, rather than a blog, so it can have both a topical and chronological access path, but I am open to the blog approach as well if others will write content too.

Howard

----- Original Message ----- From: Herbert Valerio Riedel javascript:;> To: Howard B. Golden javascript:;> Cc: "ghc-devs@haskell.org javascript:;" javascript:;

...

Sent: Friday, January 3, 2014 2:24 PM Subject: Re: Idea for improving communication between devs and potential devs

On 2014-01-03 at 21:57:18 +0100, Howard B. Golden wrote:

...

In addition, I'd like to start some sort of "what's new" that boils down the GHC Dev mailing list discussion as LWN does for the Linux kernel mailing list.

maybe

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog

could be revived by that...?

_______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org javascript:; http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

(Apologies for resending this, but my mailer was acting wonky. Also, apologies for dragging up a fairly old thread.) Hello. I'm (also) looking to get more involved with GHC, and Haskell generally. To that end, nominolo, could you give me a wiki account? Also, pending this discussion, what permissions would I need to write blog entries? https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/blog On 01/03/2014 06:21 PM, Howard B. Golden wrote:

Herbert,

A revived blog would be great as well, if the Simons and other devs have time to write it. I certainly don't know enough to write it myself, but I can collate what others are talking about and maybe agreeing about on the mailing list. I think what I can produce would work better as wiki entries, rather than a blog, so it can have both a topical and chronological access path, but I am open to the blog approach as well if others will write content too.

Howard

I would really enjoy reading a description of recent commits -- it'd give me a fighting chance to understand what's going on. Perhaps with some concentrated effort and a little time, Howard and I would be able to write those, since it really comes to down asking the primary devs the right questions about their work: questions that might even help them refine the quality a bit, by creating awareness. However, in the meantime, there's another project Howard and/or I could embark upon, that's even easier to get started on: Transcribing everything we learn, to build up a suite of entry-level documentation. We could write some good, introductory material and post it to the blog. Both Howard and I have a good perspective of what challenges new comers may face, so we could definitely make it relevant. Later, it could be compiled (e.g. a page full of blog links) in the wiki and become the new dev boot-strap guide. I have already one good article in mind, "How to get an answer on ghc-devs". This would consist largely of material from one of January's threads: http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-January/003585.html <snip> I'm not exactly sure how much time I can commit to this, but I guess that's not profoundly unique. Regards, Jonathan Paugh

Howard, Something like LWN would be neat. And improving the wiki (especially with documentation about GHC itself) would be great. IMO I also think the blog would work well for this (it's reasonably integrated into the wiki,) but I agree we should perhaps have some other people contribute and write for it if that was the case, for diversity. Of course, people also like to write on their own blogs about new developments... As a suggestion, one really easy thing to do is this: subscribe to ghc-commits@haskell.org, and just read all the commits that come in. No, you will not understand all of them immediately, and don't waste an hour per commit, but just read over them. If you follow the development closely, it will help immensely in your quest to understand 'the big picture' (this is essentially how I started - by lurking the commits list.) It'll also give you lots of great starting points for things to talk about. As always, the wiki is open and free to be edited - so please feel free to write some stuff down and send it with a summary email to the list (and be sure to include glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org, so users can see it too.) On Mon, Jan 6, 2014 at 4:40 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:

Howard

Thanks... improving the wiki would be a great contribution. If you point me to new material that you write, I'd be happy to review it.

Simon

| -----Original Message----- | From: ghc-devs [mailto:ghc-devs-bounces@haskell.org] On Behalf Of Howard | B. Golden | Sent: 03 January 2014 20:57 | To: ghc-devs@haskell.org | Subject: Idea for improving communication between devs and potential | devs | | Hi, | | I'd like to get involved in developing, but I recognize the learning | curve involved. To get started I'd like to improve the Trac wiki | documentation. Part of this would include additional documentation of | less-documented parts of the compiler and RTS. In addition, I'd like to | start some sort of "what's new" that boils down the GHC Dev mailing list | discussion as LWN does for the Linux kernel mailing list. I don't | imagine that I can do this all by myself, but I hope this idea would | resonate with others looking to get started as well. This is meant to be | more frequent and more detailed than what HCAR does for GHC now, though | I don't expect anyone can do it weekly. | | Please let me know what you think about this idea. I'm open to any | suggestions for improving it also. | | Howard B. Golden | Northridge, CA, USA | _______________________________________________ | ghc-devs mailing list | ghc-devs@haskell.org | http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

-- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/