Hi Austin,
I apologize for not having read the full email yet (I'm in a hurry right
now), but...
* Austin Seipp
--> Let's just put base and testsuite inside the GHC repository directly. No submodules, no floating repos. Just put it directly inside and make a super commit, I guess. GHC becomes the de facto repository. And hey, why not nofib?
I know, I know. People really want to split the maintenance burdens I guess, and ideologically the Haskell community is all about clean separation but, please? All of GHC HQ are the de facto maintainers of this stuff anyway. And as Jan mentioned, testsuite is really *so* crucial GHC should have it inline. The testsuite is perhaps the most important of all.
There are other candidates for this treatment too, really. For example, why is template-haskell, ghc-prim, and hpc split out? GHC is the only thing that supports them. template-haskell is especially super-intrusive of an extension to support, and arguably hpc as well. integer-simple and integer-gmp follow the exact same story. Same with hoopl and dph. They're all ours. We own them. Just put them all inside GHC and be done with it. Having active fragmentation in the VCS is not necessary when there need be none. These packages de-facto ship with GHC and are very tied to it.
I'm a strong -1 on this. As one example, we have forks of base and ghc-prim for Haskell suite: https://github.com/haskell-suite/base https://github.com/haskell-suite/ghc-prim which would be much more complicated if these were not independent repositories. But more generally, I think there's still hope that the core packages will be made portable — I'm referring to Joachim Breitner's work on splitting the base. Roman