I'd like to (re-)start the discussion on how to get fptools into darcs.
After talking to several people at ICFP this year, GHC HQ got the
distinct impression that our using darcs would lower the barrier to
contribution and encourage more people to get involved.
I have a vague plan, some of the details need to be filled in, and some
parts I don't have a good story for yet.
So fptools was once a grand unified build system, used by several
projects. Now we have a better grand unified build system, namely
Cabal, and fptools is more or less the GHC build system. One by one the
active projects are going to start using Cabal - I'm already Cabalising
Happy, Alex, and Haddock. This indicates to me that we should have
separate darcs repositories for each of the current fptools projects,
since they no longer need to share the fptools build system.
What's in fptools right now? Apart from a bunch of top-level stuff for
the build system, we have the following "projects":
alex
greencard, green-card
haddock
haggis
happy
hdirect
hood
hws
hx
ghc, libraries, hslibs, docs, glafp-utils, nofib, testsuite
First of all, we can take the alex, happy, and haddock subdirectories
and make separate darcs repositories (retaining the CVS history as far
as possible). I'm not concerned about keeping a CVS gateway for these
projects.
The following projects are not in active development and could stay in
CVS:
greencard, green-card, haggis, hdirect, hood, hws, hx
That leaves GHC, namely the subdirectories ghc, libraries, hslibs, docs,
glafp-utils, nofib, testsuite. I suggest we create a single darcs
repository with these subdirectories. Maybe nofib and testsuite should
be separate repositories for performance/space reasons, but it would be
simpler if they were all part of the same repo.
What I'm not clear about is how to handle the libraries subtree. This
is used by nhc98 and Hugs too, and presumably it would be inconvenient
for them if they had to 'darcs get' an entire GHC tree just to get the
libraries. Ideas? Perhaps we should have a separate libraries
repository from which we can push/pull patches to/from the GHC repo?
Perhaps we should convert libraries into a darcs repo of its own, and
then pull it into the GHC repo (how do you create the repos such that
this is possible - do they have to have a common root of some kind?).
Also, we'll need a two-way CVS gateway between the old fptools and the
GHC darcs repo (and the libraries repo), at least for the time being.
Long term, when we no longer need CVS, I'd like to rearrange the GHC
tree. We can rename the root from fptools to ghc (yay!) and flatten the
hierarchy.
John Goerzen has offered to do the initial conversion, we at GHC HQ will
provide whatever help we can.
Cheers,
Simon
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