On Tue, Sep 18, 2012 at 1:25 PM, Ian Lynagh <ian@well-typed.com> wrote:

Why do you want to build 7.6 but not 7.6.1, OOI?

I was trying to build a different branch which is a fork of 7.6---I wanted to play around with the profiling suite described in the "Core Diving" talk from the Haskell Implementors workshop.

> More generally, I run into this problem all the time with people trying to
> build the branch I work on, so it really would be nice if we started using
> sub-modules to keep track of this dependency. I talked to folks at ICFP
> about this, and one idea was that we could check in the "fingerprint" for a
> branch into the repo, and track the dependencies this way, but this is

See
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building/GettingTheSources#Trackingthefullrepositorystate

The nightly build logs include a fingerprint.

Where are the nightly build logs?

> 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).

-Iavor