RE: The end of an era, and the dawn of a new one

(Narrowing to cvs-ghc for now.)

Speaking for myself, I would welcome a code-ownership model along the lines that Ben suggests. If it works well it would
  a) spread the load
  b) broaden a genuine sense of ownership
  c) because of (a) and (b), perhaps encourage more people to participate

What do others think?

Simon

| -----Original Message-----
| From: Ben Lippmeier [mailto:[email protected]]
| Sent: 06 December 2012 10:57
| To: Simon Peyton-Jones
| Cc: haskell; [email protected]; Haskell Cafe (haskell-
| [email protected]); Simon Marlow
| Subject: Re: The end of an era, and the dawn of a new one
| 
| 
| On 06/12/2012, at 3:56 , Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
| 
| > Particularly valuable are offers to take responsibility for a
| > particular area (eg the LLVM code generator, or the FFI).  I'm hoping
| > that this sea change will prove to be quite empowering, with GHC
| > becoming more and more a community project, more resilient with fewer
| > single points of failure.
| 
| The LLVM project has recently come to the same point. The codebase has
| become too large for Chris Lattner to keep track of it all, so they've
| moved to a formal "Code Ownership" model. People own particular
| directories of the code base, and the code owners are expected to review
| patches for those directories.
| 
| The GHC project doesn't have a formal patch review process, I think
| because the people with commit access on d.h.o generally know who owns
| what. Up until last week I think it was "SPJ owns the type checker and
| simplifier, and SM owns everything else." :-)
| 
| 
| At this stage, I think it would help if we followed the LLVM approach of
| having a formal CODE_OWNERS file in the root path of the repo explicitly
| listing the code owners. That way GHC HQ knows what's covered and what
| still needs a maintainer. The LLVM version is here [1].
| 
| Code owners would:
| 1) Be the go-to person when other developers have questions about that
| code.
| 2) Fix bugs in it that no-one else has claimed.
| 3) Generally keep the code tidy, documented and well-maintained.
| 
| Simon: do you want a CODE_OWNERS file? If so then I can start it. I
| think it's better to have it directly in the repo than on the wiki, that
| way no-one that works on the code can miss it.
| 
| I suppose I'm the default owner of the register allocators and non-LLVM
| native code generators.
| 
| Ben.
| 
| [1] http://llvm.org/viewvc/llvm-
| project/llvm/trunk/CODE_OWNERS.TXT?view=markup
| 
|