On 12/14/12 10:56 AM, Gershom Bazerman wrote:
On 12/14/12 9:44 AM, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
This thread has made it clear that we should do more to help people find a "way in" to GHC. Here is what I have done:
·Started a GHC Reading List page http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/ReadingList, giving background reading. It's just a start; there are many gaps. I would love it if you would all help fill it out. It's a wiki.
·Amplified the Working on GHC http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/WorkingConventions page. Again, please help make it more useful. It's a wiki.
What else would help? If the answer is X, can anyone help do X?
Something else that I think would be useful is a long-term 'wishlist' for ghc, consisting of modest goals from an engineering standpoint. [...] A sense of this might help interested contributors to decide where to direct their efforts.
I agree wholeheartedly. A lot of times fixing bugs requires one to already have a good idea how everything is structured. And research features require one to be interested/able to do research. In my experience with other projects, the more mid-term engineering tasks tend to be a great place to get started. Now, I wonder, how should we go about setting this up? Wiki pages are good for the more long-term or more visionary sorts of goals, but they're too liable to get out of date for the short- and mid-term engineering goals. The bug tracker already has a listing for "tasks" rather than "bugs"[1]. Perhaps we should be advertising that more? Or should we tweak the tracker settings to provide a better venue for these sorts of tasks? The latter would make it easy to have a wiki page on teaching folks how to search for tasks appropriate to their comfort level... [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/report/2 -- Live well, ~wren