Version control systems

[Manuel M T Chakravarty]

Thomas Schilling:
> Are you advocating for ease of use by new developers or for existing
> developers? Current GHC hackers have to learn Git anyways and know
> Darcs already. Library patches still have to be recorded separately,
> so it would be a bit weird, but not much harder, really.

I am arguing for both.  It would be more than weird.  For example, if  
you branch ghc, you usually need to branch the core libraries, too.   
Doing that in two different vcs sounds like a mess to me.

Moreover, as I wrote a few times before, some reasons for switching in  
the first place are invalidated by not having the core libraries in  
git, too.  For example, one complaint about darcs is that it either  
doesn't build (on the Sun Solaris T1 and T2 machines) or is buggy (on  
Mac OS with MacPorts), and hence people have trouble getting the  
sources out of darcs in the first place.  How is that going to be  
addressed if some crucial code still needs to be obtained using darcs?

Manuel
> On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 1:59 AM, Manuel M T Chakravarty
> <chak at cse.unsw.edu.au> wrote:
>> Neil Mitchell:
>>>
>>> If it really makes the life easier for people who are having lots of
>>> VCS pain at the moment, then its hard to object. But many of the
>>> comments in this discussion, about how everyone is going to flock to
>>> GHC just as soon as it switches to Git, seem overly optimistic. I
>>> think GHC is a few years off becoming drive-by hacker friendly, for
>>> many other reasons.
>>
>> It's not about becoming "drive-by hacker friendly".  It is about not
>> becoming even less friendly as it is right now.