mathw / xhaskell

Exercism Exercises in Haskell

xHaskell

Exercism exercises in Haskell

Contributing Guide

• Asking for help
• How to contribute
  • Reporting or fixing bugs
  • Reviewing issues and pull requests
  • Porting exercises
  • Updating an exercise test suite
• Repository structure and conventions
  • Directory structure
  • Exercise structure
• Writing an issue
• Writing a pull request
• Development Dependencies
• Stub solution
• Example solution
• Test suite
• Running tests
• Running HLint

Asking for help

When in doubt just ask!

• gitter support: more specific/technical questions.
• gitter dev: technical questions.

In any case, don't be afraid or shy! We promise to be friendly and as helpful as possible.

How to contribute

As a first step we recommend you read the contributing guide.

Reporting or fixing bugs

Typical examples for a bug: A typo, a missing test case, an unclear or ambiguous problem description.

• If you are unsure whether you have really found a bug just ask.
• To report a bug you can write an issue.
• If you already have a fix for it you may write a pull request.

Reviewing issues and pull requests

If you have a dedicated opinion you are welcome to write a comment for an issue or a pull request. Please be detailed and include reasons, links or arguments to support your opinion.

Porting exercises

Here is the list of missing exercises. See here for more information about porting an exercise. Of course you can also add a totally new exercise, but it might be a good idea to first discuss it in one of our forums.

Updating an exercise test suite

Updating a test suite of an existing exercise is special because it usually affects all languages. Read more about it here. Note that the whole test suite must run with the sample solution within a couple of seconds.

Repository structure and conventions

Here is a general description of all the files and directories that are not explicitly described below.

Directory structure

├── .gitignore
├── .travis.yml
├── LICENSE
├── README.md
├── bin
│ └── fetch‐configlet
├── config.json
├── docs
│ ├── ABOUT.md
│ ├── INSTALLATION.md
│ ├── LEARNING.md
│ ├── RESOURCES.md
│ └── TESTS.md
└── exercises
  ├── TRACK_HINTS.md
  └── accumulate
  │ ├── HINTS.md
  │ ├── package.yaml
  │ ├── stack.yaml
  │ ├── examples
  │ │ └── success-standard
  │ │   ├── package.yaml
  │ │   └── src
  │ │     └── Accumuĺate.hs
  │ ├── src
  │ │ └── Accumuĺate.hs
  │ └── test
  │   └── Tests.hs
  └── allergies
  │ ├── ...
  └── ...

• config.json: Every exercise has to be registered here. It has a unique name and a difficulty. The sequence order is also the default order in which the exercises are fetched.

Exercise structure

Each exercise has the following structure:

• stack.yaml has just one line specifying the current Stack snapshot. We use the same resolver for all the exercises.
• package.yaml is a file in the hpack format that has all dependencies and build instructions for an exercise.
• HINTS.md is an optional file containing instructions and/or hints. It is used together with the respective description.md for the exercise from x-common to build the README.md file.
• src/ModuleName.hs is a stub solution.
• examples/success-<name>/package.yaml contains library dependencies for the example solution. <name> is a unique name for the example - usually "standard" (as in success-standard), but it can be some other name in case of multiple example solutions.
• examples/success-<name>/src/ModuleName.hs is the source code of the sample solution.
• test/Tests.hs is the test suite.

Writing an issue

To report a bug you should create an issue here.

Writing a pull request

To fix a bug you should create a pull request from a fork here. See also here for more information.

Development Dependencies

You should have Stack installed in your system to make contributing to this repository easier.

Stub solution

The stub solution should be as general as possible in order to not exclude any possible solutions. It should take Haskell specifics into account (for example use Maybe instead of a dummy return value). It should not contain any comments (people might forget to remove them), you can use the hints file instead.

The stub solution must compile by itself (with stack build). Ideally, it would also compile together with the test suite (with stack test --no-run-tests). These two conditions are enforced by Travis. If the second condition cannot be met for a good reason, place the explanation in .meta/DONT-TEST-STUB to circumvent the check. The first condition is always enforced and cannot be circumvented.

Example solution

The example solution could be inspiration for other language implementors. It doesn't need to be perfect or very elegant. But it should be efficient enough for the test suite to finish in only a few seconds.

Examples are named <type>-<name>. There are three possible types of examples:

• success: The example is expected to pass the tests. There should be at least one of these per exercise.
• fail: The example is expected to build, but fail the tests.
• error: The example is expected to fail to build.

Test suite

The test suite should be derived from the respective x-common/exercises/<exercise-name>/canonical-data.json and comply to some formatting and coding standards (to get an idea you may look at some of the existing tests).

Running Tests

In order to be accepted by Travis-CI, every exercise must be registered in config.json, it must compile without warnings and the example solution must pass the tests without failures. Additionally the tests should not run longer than a few seconds.

First you need to provide an example solution.

We provide three scripts in the bin directory of this repository to run the tests. These are the same scripts as those used by Travis CI.

• test-example path/to/example/dir runs the tests on a single example.
• test-all-examples path/to/exercise/dir runs the tests on all examples for an exercise.
• test-stub path/to/exercise/dir checks that the stub for the given exercise compiles.

Running HLint

All code in this repository should be as idiomatic as possible, so we enforce in Travis-CI that it returns No hints when processed by HLint.

It is highly recommended to run hlint on your sources before opening a pull request, so you can fix your code before submitting it for review.

If you are certain that a suggestion given by hlint would make the code worse, you can suppress it with annotations in the source file.

Haskell icon

The Haskell icon was designed by Darrin Thompson and Jeff Wheeler. It was released under the HaskellWiki license.