The build/test system could be scaring away potential developers too. Not to complain or anything, but I used to try building GHC (form scratch) every 2 months or so and It would (usually) completely fail to build on Windows and OSX, and when it does, there would be some problem with the makefile where it either wouldn't rebuild properly and required a dist-clean or it wouldn't handle anything above -j1 properly. I'm (hoping) that these issues have been resolved by now. The test suite is also really scary. Regards.