On 10/08/2008, at 14:40, Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
Personally, I am more than happy to stay with darcs, too, but my understanding was that at least the Simons decided that we are going to move from darcs to git. All I am saying is that whatever vcs ghc uses, you need to be able to *easily* get, modify, and commit patches to the HEAD and the boot libs with *just one* vcs. Using two vcs is going to make the current situation worse, not better.
I suspect that if GHC switches to git, it will become the standard vcs in the Haskell community sooner or later. Expecting that people (especially newcomers) will use different vcs for different libraries/ compilers is just unrealistic. Really, why should they? Any advantages in usability that darcs might have over git will be overshadowed by the inconvenience of having to remember two different sets of commands. I expect that many new projects will use git and old projects will start switching to it over time. So if the move is made, it should IMO include as big a chunk of the infrastructure as possible. Eventually, it will migrate to git anyway and the earlier it does, the simpler life will be for the developers. As to whether the switch should be made at all, I'm not sure. I've had my share of problems with darcs and I don't think it's suitable for a project of GHC's size at the moment. On the other hand, I suspect that a mixture of git and darcs repos will be even more problematic than what we have now. Maybe investing some time in fixing the most obvious darcs problems would be a better solution? Roman