Haskell Foundation October and November 2022 Update
Technical Agenda
DevOps
In addition to his usual work on making it easier to contribute to GHC, Bryan undertook a major server migration project for GHC’s project hosting. His weekly updates from this period contain the details:
Error Message Documentation
The Haskell Error Index and Stack now support each other! This means that after the next release, Stack errors such as malformed stack.yaml files will report an error code that can be looked up for specific documentation. I’d like to thank @mpilgrem for doing the hard work to make this happen.
We’re now up to 66 errors and warnings, with 64 for GHC and 2 for Stack. 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. There are two proposals on which feedback would be very valuable right now:
- Establishing a standard for running individual tests from IDEs
- Rearchitecting Haddock to make maintenance and contribution easier
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’ve identified the ability to deprecate exports as a priority for implementation. While there are many technical tools that can help, deprecation of exports has an approved GHC proposal and is only awaiting implementation. If you’d like to do this, we will arrange mentorship for you, though it’s probably not a good first GHC contribution.
Meeting notes:
GHC issue prioritization
The GHC development team asked for assistance from the Haskell Foundation in prioritizing the next three to six months of work. As a pilot process, we contacted a number of users of GHC and asked for feedback about their priorities and needs. We are currently in the process of reviewing this feedback to produce a higher-level plan.
Community
Haskell Love videos
In collaboration with Konfy, the Haskell Foundation arranged for the video recordings from Haskell Love 2021 to be released. They’re available on YouTube.
Haskell Symposium video released
In my last update, I discussed my keynote address at the Haskell Symposium. The video has now been released.
Educator forum
We have established a mailing list for educators who use Haskell. We hope that it will be useful for coordinating things like installation instructions, homework assignments, and instructional materials. The mailing list archives are closed to enable discussion of things like specific exam questions. To join the forum, write to me at david@haskell.foundation.
Podcast
The Haskell Interlude Podcast released the following interviews:
Alejandro is stopping as a host of the podcast. Going forward, Matthías will be joining the podcast as a co-host. I’d like to thank Alejandro for his hard work and Matthías for volunteering!
Sponsorship
All of our work is made possible by our individual contributors and our sponsors. Thank you so much for your support.