Haskell Foundation DevOps Weekly Update, 2022-11-30

Another week, another weekly log!

Last week, I finally finished migrating the “gitlab-storage” server. I am really grateful that I did so much preparation in advance, because it let me quickly resolve unexpected issues as they arose. And they did arise!

I’m proud of this accomplishment. Not only did I satisfy the critical operational need, I documented the crap out of the system and wrote a big checklist for the entire operation. The next time I or anybody else needs to do another migration, we won’t have to start from scratch.

Sadly the servers repository is currently private, so I can’t link to the docs yet (nor my sweary minute-by-minute log). But my long term plan is to bring that repo into the light, so one day the information will be free.

And now it’s done! (Almost. I haven’t destroyed the old server yet. But that should happen today. All other steps, really all of them, are done.)

Moving on.

The migration took all day Thursady. Since then, I spent some time working on bumping the minimum bootstrap compiler version. This change would prevent an ugly error message that arises if people try to compile GHC with a version of GHC that’s too old to do so. Unfortunately, I got blocked by CI issues (sigh) so I am unassigning myself for now.

I also spent a lot of time babysitting CI. Today, for example, I had to monitor the pipelines all day to deconflict some patches. On the plus side, one of the patches successfully merged the JavaScript backend to master! Now GHC 9.6 will have two new backends: WASM and JavaScript. In 9.6 they are just “feature previews” and lack some important production-quality touches, but it’s a huge accomplishment and kudos are in order. They will be polished in upcoming releases.

Looking forward, the next thing on my own list with a deadline is Mac notarization. And my overriding priority continues to be removing friction for GHC contributors by making CI more reliable.

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