I'm all for converting to submodules. Since we will have submodules anyway, we could also convert testsuite et al to submodules and see how painful that is before deciding to fold them in to the main repo. I'm not clear on the pros/cons of having, e.g., testsuite, as a submodule vs folded in. The submodule approach will certainly maintain history! Geoff On 12/04/2013 04:24 PM, Austin Seipp wrote:
Hi all,
While discussing something with Herbert this week in preparation of making a new stable branch, he brought a good point to my attention, which is that if we go ahead and reorganize the repository situation post 7.8, merging things to the stable branch from HEAD will become a bit harder.
Notably, we had planned to fold testsuite (and perhaps some other repositories) into the GHC tree. Once we do this, the two branches will have diverged quite a bit, so merging from HEAD to STABLE will become harder* (because HEAD would have rolled in testsuite changes for example, but the STABLE branch would not have this history.)
Thinking about it, the best time to do such a move is, basically, when there is no active stable branch. Unfortunately this time is right now, but I'm not sure how everyone feels about this.
So, the question is: should we go ahead and pull the trigger on some of these perhaps? Herbert collected some numbers on the git repositories and outlined all the basic details here:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GitRepoReorganization
The only thing I'd honestly propose right now is folding 'testsuite' into the main repository, but of course we should see what people think - perhaps we should keep base/etc off the table for now, since they seem more controversial.
* I'll point out they will only become *slightly* harder in most cases, because I can always instead apply unified diffs, rather than cherry pick or something. But it does lose the original metadata from commits too. But I won't cry if people vote against this.