Proposal: better library management ideas (was: how to checkout proper submodules)

[Roman Cheplyaka]

Hi Austin,

I apologize for not having read the full email yet (I'm in a hurry right
now), but...

* Austin Seipp <aseipp at pobox.com> [2013-06-09 00:23:22-0500]
> --> Let's just put base and testsuite inside the GHC repository
> directly. No submodules, no floating repos. Just put it directly
> inside and make a super commit, I guess. GHC becomes the de facto
> repository. And hey, why not nofib?
> 
> I know, I know. People really want to split the maintenance burdens I
> guess, and ideologically the Haskell community is all about clean
> separation but, please? All of GHC HQ are the de facto maintainers of
> this stuff anyway. And as Jan mentioned, testsuite is really *so*
> crucial GHC should have it inline. The testsuite is perhaps the most
> important of all.
> 
> There are other candidates for this treatment too, really. For
> example, why is template-haskell, ghc-prim, and hpc split out? GHC is
> the only thing that supports them. template-haskell is especially
> super-intrusive of an extension to support, and arguably hpc as well.
> integer-simple and integer-gmp follow the exact same story. Same with
> hoopl and dph. They're all ours. We own them. Just put them all inside
> GHC and be done with it. Having active fragmentation in the VCS is not
> necessary when there need be none. These packages de-facto ship with
> GHC and are very tied to it.

I'm a strong -1 on this. As one example, we have forks of base and
ghc-prim for Haskell suite:

  https://github.com/haskell-suite/base
  https://github.com/haskell-suite/ghc-prim

which would be much more complicated if these were not independent
repositories.

But more generally, I think there's still hope that the core packages
will be made portable — I'm referring to Joachim Breitner's work on
splitting the base.

Roman