Richard Eisenberg writes:

Hi devs,

I'm onboarding a new contributor (Gert-Jan Bottu), whose patch (!2465) makes commensurate changes in Haddock. In order to use CI, then, he needs to be able to push a wip/ branch to our fork of Haddock. In order to do that, he needs to be in the `ghc` group. (I'm assuming -- but have not checked -- that just forking Haddock on the gitlab.haskell.org http://gitlab.haskell.org/ instance is not enough. The wiki page on submodules (https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/working-conventions/git/submodules suggests it is not.) That same wiki page says the one needs merely ask to join the `ghc` group. Good. So I follow the "ask" link to get to https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/mailing-lists-and-irc#mailing-lists... https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/wikis/mailing-lists-and-irc#mailing-lists... . That page helpfully describes where we can be reached, but it's not all that helpful for someone who wants to join the `ghc` group. According to that page, newcomers have to post publicly in either ghc-devs (I have never seen such a request there) or in #ghc. If I'm new in town, I wouldn't feel all that happy doing so, likely wanting to wait until I actually had a patch accepted before requesting rights.... but of course I need access to CI in order to get a patch accepted.

Instead, would it be possible to have some sort of ghc-admin list, perhaps? While (I think) I know the individuals to contact for a request like this, an official mailing list would make this more transparent and, in my opinion, easier to onboard new contributors. I understand if folks don't want yet another mailing list, but then is here some other approach here that doesn't require posting in public?

Hi Richard, Regarding requesting access to the `ghc` group, GitLab already provides a mechanism for this: there is a "Request Access" link right below the group title here [1]. This is admittedly a recent addition as I hadn't noticed that the feature was disabled in the group configuration (the link turns into a "Leave group" link if you are already a group member so I hadn't noticed that the feature was inactive). I have updated the instructions on the submodules wiki page to reflect this new feature. Does this look better? Cheers, - Ben [1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc