[swift-dev] sharing tips and tricks and scripts

[Erik Eckstein]

I recently had some discussions about how to share those little tips and tricks which everyone has to make building, debugging, etc. the swift compiler easier.

And actually we already have a central place for this: it’s the docs folder in the swift repo. Especially the DebuggingTheCompiler.rst document contains many useful little things which might help debugging the compiler.

So with this email I want to “announce” this, because I found that many people didn’t know that.
And also I’d like to encourage everyone to contribute to DebuggingTheCompiler.rst and other documents. 

Another thing is that many people have implemented their own little helper scripts for various purposes, which they share by email with others and those emails get lost, and nobody knows what’s the latest version of a script, etc.
We have many of such scripts already in utils. But utils got already very convoluted. So I propose to create a sub-folder, e.g. ‘dev-scripts’ to place such scripts (just for new scripts, I’m not proposing moving existing scripts). The intention is to keep the bar low to contribute to dev-scripts. So scripts may be not super-polished and it’s also ok to have multiple scripts which do similar things.
Some scripts might get attention and turn out to be useful for many people and thus get improved over time. We can eventually move such scripts out of dev-scripts into the “production” folder utils.

Please let me know if you have any comments.

Thanks,
Erik