Hello Edward,
First off, welcome to the wonderful world of GHC development! I recommend that you subscribe to the ghc-devs mailing list and direct GHC specific questions there:
Thanks, I didn't know that. I subscribed and I will ask further questions to that list.
GHC has a 'make tags' command but I've never gotten it to work. I have always just run 'hasktags .' in the compiler/ directory, which works pretty well for me. (If you're in the RTS, run ctags, etc instead)
Great! It worked at the first try and I already started using it.
We've been discussing putting together an easy bugs list. As a proxy, you can search on the 'Difficulty' keyword: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=infoneeded&status=merge&status=new&status=patch&difficulty=Easy+(less+than+1+hour)&col=id&col=summary&col=status&col=type&col=priority&col=milestone&col=component&order=priority
For example, this bug seems like a good beginner bug to get your feet wet with the RTS: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/750
This one will give you some experience wrangling the test suite: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/8079
Moving up to the moderate category, here is a nontrivial bug involving profiling and the optimizer: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/609
As with all open source projects, there is always lots of infrastructural work to be done, so if that's your sort of thing, there are plenty of bugs in that category.
Thanks, I'll start looking for issues with easy difficulty for now and ask further questions to ghc-devs mailing list. --- Ömer Sinan Ağacan http://osa1.net