On Wed, Jun 5, 2013 at 5:10 PM, David Terei <davidterei@gmail.com> wrote:

On 5 June 2013 01:43, Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak@cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:

I agree with Austin and Johan. It's a bizarre setup. Submodules have their pain points (which we already have to deal with), but the ability to properly snapshot and branch the whole tree would be a serious benefit IMO.

Manuel

PS: While we are at it, why don't we just have the main repos on GitHub and use forks and pull requests like the rest of the world? (Using Git, but not GitHub's superb infrastructure, seems like a terrible waste to me.)

I'd be all for this. We partially use the GitHub infrastructure since trac broke and I changed the emails to point to GitHub instead. I also often do code reviews with other devs on a personal GHC fork on github before merging in.

I believe it would also help encourage more contributors (especially for libraries) but others have expressed disagreement with this point of view in the past and I'm not in hold of data.

I strongly suspect that fixing the original issue from this thread would do much more to encourage contributions. It certainly doesn't matter to me if ghc is on github or not, but I (as an extremely meager GHC hacker) find it near-impossible to maintain a usable repo if I want to do any sort of branching or checkouts. And while I hate git submodules with a passion, I agree with everyone who thus far has said that the current practice is even less usable (all the drawbacks and none of benefits).