On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 12:19 PM, Simon Marlow <marlo...@gmail.com> wrote: > It's time to consider again whether we should migrate GHC development from > darcs to (probably) git. > > From our perspective at GHC HQ, the biggest problem that we would hope to > solve by switching is that darcs makes branching and merging very difficult > for us. We have a few branches of HEAD that are very painful to keep merged > with HEAD, and we would almost certainly have more branches if the overhead > were lower. In some sense the overhead is self-inflicted because we have > the no-conflict policy in the mainline repository, but that is to avoid > problems with darcs' merging algorithms (both performance and correctness). > We are still using darcs v1 patches rather than v2, but there are known > problems with v2 which are preventing us from upgrading. > > The darcs team have been making great strides with performance, but conflict > handling remains a serious problem. The darcs roadmap doesn't show this > being fixed in the near future > > http://wiki.darcs.net/Roadmap > > Rebase support is coming, and it does work, though the workflow is a bit > laborious. > > Besides the branching/merging/conflict issue, switching to git would give us > plenty of side benefits, notably via access to a wealth of tool support. > Making contribution easy is important to us too, and there are a lot of > people using git. > > The cost of switching is quite high, which is one reason we decided to stay > with darcs last time. We have multiple repos that need to be converted, and > for some of them, where the repo is being shared with other projects, we may > have to mirror rather than convert in place. We're prepared to put in the > effort if the gains would be worthwhile though (offers of help are more than > welcome!). > > > We're intrested in opinions from both active and potential GHC > developers/contributors. Let us know what you think - would this make life > harder or easier for you? Would it make you less likely or more likely to > contribute? > > Cheers, > Simon
I've contributed a small patch or two to GHC before, but nothing major. I expect the future to be similar: I don't anticipate doing any major work on GHC, but if I come across an itch which I see as within my capabilities and worthwhile to scratch, I might scratch it. I didn't have any problem with darcs after getting over the (not so steep) learning curve, and if GHC were to switch to git, I don't think I would have any problem with that either. So I guess I'll just be fine either way. > > _______________________________________________ > Cvs-ghc mailing list > cvs-...@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/cvs-ghc > -- Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively. _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
