Re: Version control systems

Jason Dagit:

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 10:44 PM, Roman Leshchinskiy

...

wrote:

Maybe investing some time in fixing the most obvious darcs problems would be a better solution?

We're working on that over at Darcs HQ, but there is no guarantee that we'd come close to fixing the problems within the 4-5 week window that Ian mentioned. Supposing that the main problems GHC has with darcs 2 format get solved in the next month, would that give GHC reason enough to keep using darcs? It seems many of you are eager to use git; perhaps even if darcs was working to satisfaction.

People will be working on making darcs work better with the GHC repo as a test case either way. And personally, since I'm not a GHC dev, the decision doesn't affect my life. Having said that, I'm still obviously biased. I'd love for darcs to work well enough that this never came up.

Same here, and fwiw I won't change any of my many other darcs repos any time soon. However, as I have said before, if ghc is to switch, it must be a clean switch, and no messy use of two vcs at the same time for ghc and boot libs.

Let me throw out one more idea: What if, as a GHC contributor, I could pick equally between git and darcs? My understanding is that, while not optimal, you could use tailor[1] to synchronize a darcs repository with a git one. Offer up both repositories and keep them in sync. Let the masses decide?

I don't think that this technical feasible. I used tailor once to convert a CVS repo to darcs, and while that was better than throwing away the history, it was pretty messy and nothing that you would want to do on a regular basis. Besides, even if the actual conversion would work smoothly (which I strongly doubt), you'd immediately be faced with problems of atomicity and associated race conditions of commits to the two repos. Manuel