Repository Reorganization Question

[Austin Seipp]

Hi all,

While discussing something with Herbert this week in preparation of
making a new stable branch, he brought a good point to my attention,
which is that if we go ahead and reorganize the repository situation
post 7.8, merging things to the stable branch from HEAD will become a
bit harder.

Notably, we had planned to fold testsuite (and perhaps some other
repositories) into the GHC tree. Once we do this, the two branches
will have diverged quite a bit, so merging from HEAD to STABLE will
become harder* (because HEAD would have rolled in testsuite changes
for example, but the STABLE branch would not have this history.)

Thinking about it, the best time to do such a move is, basically, when
there is no active stable branch. Unfortunately this time is right
now, but I'm not sure how everyone feels about this.

So, the question is: should we go ahead and pull the trigger on some
of these perhaps? Herbert collected some numbers on the git
repositories and outlined all the basic details here:

https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GitRepoReorganization

The only thing I'd honestly propose right now is folding 'testsuite'
into the main repository, but of course we should see what people
think - perhaps we should keep base/etc off the table for now, since
they seem more controversial.

* I'll point out they will only become *slightly* harder in most
cases, because I can always instead apply unified diffs, rather than
cherry pick or something. But it does lose the original metadata from
commits too. But I won't cry if people vote against this.

-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/