Version control systems

[Don Stewart]

kili:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2008 at 04:17:59PM +0100, Simon Marlow wrote:
> [...]
> > As for Cabal - we had a thread on cvs-ghc last week, and as I said there
> > we'd love to hear suggestions for how to improve things, including wild 
> > and crazy ideas for throwing it all away and starting again.  However, as 
> > I explained, there are good reasons for the way things are done now, the 
> > main one being that the build system for packages is not written twice.
> 
> Well, at least the Makefile creation was a step (the first step?)
> into the wrong direction, IMHO. I'll run a GHC build to get some
> of those generated Makefiles and followup on cvs-ghc, but for a
> starter, Cabal shouldn't know anything about implementation-specific
> internal build systems; instead it should rely only on it's own
> metadata.  Implementation-specific stuff (such as how to run the
> compiler) should be supplied by the implementation, not by Cabal.
> 
> I see more and more workarounds for workarounds for an unmaintainable
> (and unusable) build system, and after the latest discussions about
> git vs. darcs, maintaining GHC-specific branches of libraries etc.,
> I think I'll just drop maintainership from all GHC-related OpenBSD
> ports until the GHC build system chaos settles down a little bit.

Ian, please read this.
The inability to build GHC reliably is a problem.

Can someone with a plan please describe what measures are in place
to ensure GHC emerges buildable, and the tree regains the status of a
tree that *does not break*?

-- Don