Re: Version control systems

Thomas Schilling:

Are you advocating for ease of use by new developers or for existing developers? Current GHC hackers have to learn Git anyways and know Darcs already. Library patches still have to be recorded separately, so it would be a bit weird, but not much harder, really.

I am arguing for both. It would be more than weird. For example, if you branch ghc, you usually need to branch the core libraries, too. Doing that in two different vcs sounds like a mess to me. Moreover, as I wrote a few times before, some reasons for switching in the first place are invalidated by not having the core libraries in git, too. For example, one complaint about darcs is that it either doesn't build (on the Sun Solaris T1 and T2 machines) or is buggy (on Mac OS with MacPorts), and hence people have trouble getting the sources out of darcs in the first place. How is that going to be addressed if some crucial code still needs to be obtained using darcs? Manuel

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 1:59 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:

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Neil Mitchell:

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If it really makes the life easier for people who are having lots of VCS pain at the moment, then its hard to object. But many of the comments in this discussion, about how everyone is going to flock to GHC just as soon as it switches to Git, seem overly optimistic. I think GHC is a few years off becoming drive-by hacker friendly, for many other reasons.

It's not about becoming "drive-by hacker friendly". It is about not becoming even less friendly as it is right now.