Tech Agenda Track: Meeting Minutes 3/12

Haskell Foundation Technical Task Force (Slot 2) Meeting
12 March 2021

Present:

Emily Pillmore
Andrew Boardman
Théophile Choutri
Andrew Lelechenko
Edward Kmett
Chris Dornan
Richard Eisenberg


Notes from Previous Meeting:

Tech Agenda Track: Meeting Minutes 3/10

We will work in two different groups, given our availability and time zone differences, using Slack for asynchronous coordination.

Performance Dashboards

some questions about how to expand this beyond core packages:

  • how do we know that the methodology of external libraries is sound? e.g. that they don’t run benchmarks on the cloud.
  • To avoid problems, we may want to run all the tests on our own box
  • should this be open to all of Haskell? perhaps, but only by application. and not for now; let’s gain
  • experience first

Ben & Davean to lead in fleshing this out.

Performance Book

GHC Cadence Discussion

  • Backporting is costly and difficult to manage, testing is hard
  • Ben is the mechanism, will not decide on this.
  • Testing is not the problem - longstanding issues are finally surfacing (e.g. ARM)
  • Windows support is struggling in recent releases
  • How do we decide what time frame is best?
  • Question: who feels the pain from minor releases? is it GHC or users? (maintainers?)
  • Andrew:
    • if we have fewer releases of GHC, we could have more backports, and we would not need as many major releases.
  • Pain within GHC is about # of patches, not really # of releases
  • Pain for users is around changes in base and template-haskell

We need data:

  • How do we collect data about what breaks from version to version?
  • Set up a separate issue tracker for collecting “this broke” comments.
  • Opt-in automatic metrics phone home
  • Would need to get detailed about what data was being collected, and make that publicly available

Migration path:

With tools like retrie and hlint, we are able to give better indications to our users when a release breaks something that we can catch with one of those tools.

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  • Everything is in order to do the thing, a proposal will be written next week.
  • 3 industry partners so far are +1 on the idea, and we’ll speak with more to develop a better impact assessment, but 3/3 so far is a good indicator.
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