Haskell Foundation December and January 2022-2023 Update
Happy New Year!
Technical Agenda
DevOps
In addition to his usual work on improving the reliability of GHC’s CI infrastructure, Bryan spent time exploring the macOS application notarization system.
Error Message Documentation
errors.haskell.org continues to grow, and it is now supported by the latest release of GHCup. The site is now supported by Stack and GHCup, and the upcoming GHC version 9.6.1 will also support it. The site now documents 72 errors and warnings. If you’d like to contribute to Haskell tooling, but aren’t yet comfortable sending patches upstream, then documenting error messages or improving the examples is a way that you can contribute that doesn’t require any skills beyond Markdown. All contributions are reviewed, and we’re happy to help with any technical questions as you write documentation.
Technical Working Group
The HF’s Technical Working Group continues looking for opportunities to benefit the Haskell ecosystem that the HF can support. Right now, John Ericson is working on a plan to allow base and GHC to be released independently, and to allow platforms such as Web browsers to have different collections of IO primitives than traditional Unix-like OSes or Windows. @santiweight is working on a standard way for test frameworks to allow text editors to run individual tests conveniently. Laurent P. René de Cotret’s proposal on decoupling Haddock from GHC seems to have hit a technical roadblock, and they’ve found that it’s likely to be more difficult than first expected. If you have feedback on any of these open proposals, please post it in the comment threads.
Meeting notes:
Stability Working Group
The Stability Working Group is continuing to look for both social and technical means of managing changes and reducing their cost.
We are still interested in getting the ability to deprecate exports implemented in GHC, and can arrange mentorship. This is probably not a good first GHC contribution, however.
Meeting notes:
GHC Medium-Term Priorities
The HF’s collaboration with the GHC development team on selecting development priorities for the next six months is now complete, and we released a report that documents the feedback received and how the GHC team will base their work on it. Many of the work items have already been completed.
Requirements Gathering for Nightly Releases
Much of the groundwork for more convenient access to nightly releases has been laid in recent months, and the GHC and GHCup developers are interested in making it easier to access nightly builds of GHC. The HF is helping them gather input as to how more convenient nightlies could be useful, so that these use cases can be taken into account in the design of the feature. If you have use cases that are not yet described in the discussion thread, please post them there or email them to david@haskell.foundation.
Community
FOSDEM
I will be attending FOSDEM in Brussels in support of the Haskell devroom organized by Frazer Tweedale and Troels Henriksen this coming weekend, 4-5 February. I’ll have Haskell stickers - come say “hi”!
GHC Development Workshop
The HF is in the process of organizing a workshop on contributing to GHC. While plans are not yet set in stone, we plan to hold the workshop in the three days immediately prior to Zurihac in Rapperswil, Switzerland, 7-9 June, 2023. We also intend to make online participation work as well as possible. If this seems interesting to you, please fill out our expression of interest form so that we can plan the best possible event.
Podcast
The Haskell Interlude Podcast released the following episodes:
Sponsorship
All of our work is made possible by our individual contributors and our sponsors. Thank you so much for your support.
