Brainstorming ideas for community contributions

[ivanperez-keera]

I'd like to open a thread to locate ideas of issues that would help the Copilot project that would be good candidates for new contributors, including some with no prior Haskell experience.

I see Copilot as a community project, and I'd like to increase the number of participants. I think that will be a win-win for the Haskell Community and for the project itself.

Please add below any ideas of improvements that would be great for external contributors.

Note: Please don't just start working on these ideas and start sending PRs. Our project tracks issues and PRs in a special way. Comment on the idea if you think you'd like to contribute that.

[ivanperez-keera]

The banner for the build status doesn't show up right on my machine. Github has cached the result but it's not providing the resulting image, so we see "Build Status" instead:

[fdedden]

I can confirm this, doesn't work for me either.

[RyanGlScott]

I think the modern URL for the badge is https://api.travis-ci.com/Copilot-Language/copilot.svg?branch=master :

[ivanperez-keera]

This would be a good candidate for a new-comer who's never submitted patches to the project.

[ivanperez-keera]

I'd love to add this to the next release, Copilot 4.3.

[kaBeech]

I've been leaving this for a newcomer to the project, but I'd be happy to do it if you like!

[ivanperez-keera]

We could remove the fields in UExpr similarly to how we are doing it for UType in #484.

[kaBeech]

Thank you! Will do.

[kaBeech]

Thank you again for your patience - those were some very silly mistakes made in haste. I have improved my workflow to reduce such oversights in the future. Good point about reviewing my PR with gitk as well - for some reason it had not occurred to me that I could do that locally before pushing.

It looks good to me now (fingers crossed) and it both builds locally and on Travis - I've re-posted my comment.

[ivanperez-keera]

No problem. Thanks for sending the improved version so quickly!

At first glance it looks good. I'll do a closer review soon.

[ivanperez-keera]

Massive thanks to @kaBeech for contributing a fix for this issue!

[kaBeech]

Thank you for guiding me through the process @ivanperez-keera! It's been an absolute pleasure and I look forward to contributing more.

[ivanperez-keera]

Copilot is now compatible with GHC 9.10. The README could be updated to reflect that.

[kaBeech]

I can help with this!

Edit: I got excited and volunteered for most of these. If anyone else is excited to contribute and wants to jump in on one or two of the ones I commented on, please feel free - I don't mean to hog them all!

[ivanperez-keera]

Haha. No problem. I've commented on one to see if you want to contribute that one first :)

[ivanperez-keera]

I'd love to add this to the next release, Copilot 4.3.

[ivanperez-keera]

The installation instructions are a bit odd. They tell the user to call the interpreter with an import of a Copilot module, but then the output is not very easy to understand.

[ivanperez-keera]

A separate thread was opened before to track how to best do this: #543.

[kaBeech]

I'm interested in helping with this.

[ivanperez-keera]

We'd like Copilot to have homebrew packages so that people can just install it on Mac with brew install copilot.

[ivanperez-keera]

A separate thread was opened before to track how to best do this: #537.

[ivanperez-keera]

This module https://hackage.haskell.org/package/copilot-core-4.0/docs/Copilot-Core-Type.html could use haddock headers to structure the documentation page into Types, Arrays, Structs, etc.

[kaBeech]

I'm interested in helping with this.

It seems like most of the information would be under the Types and Structs headers, with a few exceptions. It seems like typeSize and typeLength would be under the Array header. Is this correct?

[ivanperez-keera]

I'd love to add this to the next release, Copilot 4.3.

[fdedden]

@NadiaYvette made a very useful contribution during Zurihac this year, but we never came around to incorporate the changes. Basically it fixes most of the compilation warnings we have. That should make overall development of Copilot nicer, the output won't be cluttered so much with warnings.

The changes suggested by @NadiaYvette are a good start, but we definitely want to split it into PR's for the separate Copilot packages.