On 03/01/14 18:50, Gabor Greif wrote: > On 1/3/14, Mateusz Kowalczyk <fuuze...@fuuzetsu.co.uk> wrote: >> On 03/01/14 13:27, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote: >>> [snip] >>> Thank you. We need lots of help! >>> [snip] >> >> While I hate to interrupt this thread, I think this is a good chance to >> mention something. >> >> I think the big issue for joining GHC development is the lack of >> communication on the mailing list. There are many topics where a person >> has a problem with GHC tree (can't validate/build, some tests are >> failing), posts to GHC devs seeking help and never gets a reply. This is >> very discouraging and often makes it outright impossible to contribute. >> >> An easy example is the failing tests one: unfortunately some tests are >> known to fail, but they are only known to fail to existing GHC devs. A >> new person tries to validate clean tree, gets test failures, asks for >> help on GHC devs, doesn't get any, gives up. > > We should explicitly say somewhere that pinging for an answer is okay. > Sometimes the key persons (for a potential answer) are out of town or > too busy, and the question gets buried. > > Repeating the answer a few days later raises awareness and has higher > chance to succeed. This is how other technical lists (e.g. LLVM's) > work. > > Cheers, > > Gabor >
While bumping the thread might help, I don't think people missing it is always the case. Refer to Carter's recent e-mail about something very important: when is 7.8 finally happening. It was pinged 9 days later by Kazu and still no replies! In the end he had to make another thread nearly half a month after his initial one and directly CC some people to get any output… I think it's more about ‘I'm not 100% sure here so I won't say anything’ which is terrible for newcomers because to them it seems like everyone ignored their thread. For a newcomer, even ‘did you try make maintainer-clean’ might be helpful. At least they don't feel ignored. -- Mateusz K. _______________________________________________ ghc-devs mailing list ghc-devs@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs