David Terei <davidterei@gmail.com>:
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.

For the compiler, the barriers to contribution are probably elsewhere, but for the libraries, I'm sure, it would lower the barrier to entry. For example, to fix some documentation, I personally would never bother to create a patch file and attach it to some Trac ticket (where I first have to create an account). In contrast, a pull request on GitHub is a matter of a few clicks.

Manuel

PS: Anybody who doubts this needs to post their GitHub account name, so we can check that they actually ever used GitHub properly ;)