Version control systems

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

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