Hello,

perhaps we should have a well-defined place in the repo where we keep the finger-prints associated with tags and branches in the main repo?
This would make it a lot easier to get to a fully defined previous/different state.

On this note, could someone send the link to the 7.6 fingerprint?  Ian said that it is somewhere in the nightly build logs but I don't where to look.

-Iavor



On Thu, Sep 20, 2012 at 7:20 AM, Simon Marlow <marlowsd@gmail.com> wrote:
On 19/09/2012 02:15, Iavor Diatchki wrote:

  > exactly what git's submodule machinery does, so it seems pointless to

     > implement the functionality which is already there with a standard
     > interface.  Thoughts?

    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DarcsConversion#Theperspectiveonsubmodules


I have seen this.  Our custom "fingerprint" solution has the exact same
drawbacks (because it does the exact same thing as sub-modules), and in
addition it has the drawback of
   1. being a custom non-standard solution,
   2. it is not obvious where to find the "fingerprint" associated with
a particular branch (which is what lead to my question in the first place).


Well, it doesn't quite have the same drawbacks as submodules, because our solution places a burden only on someone who wants to recover a particular repository state, rather than on everyone doing development.

I think it's worth keeping an eye on submodules in case they fix the gotchas in the UI, but at the moment it looks like we'd have a lot of confused developers, lost work and accidental breakages due to people not understanding how submodules work or forgetting to jump through the correct hoops.

I'm not saying fingerprints are a good solution, obviously they only solve a part of the problem, but the current tooling for submodules leaves a lot to be desired.

Cheers,
        Simon