How to develop on a (GHC) branch with darcs

[David Peixotto]

It seems a shame that it would be so difficult to maintain a separate GHC branch. Having no long-term branches myself, I haven't yet felt the pain, but reading this email chain I am rather discouraged from attempting it. 

It makes sense to me to have tool support for branching and merging in a large open source project like GHC and doing so could increase the number of people interested in maintaining active branches. I would certainly support a move to git.

P.S.
Apparently Linus used to use Lennart's method of diff and patch for version control before switching to bitkeeper and then git: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8 about 10:30 minutes in. I guess it's a sign of a true hacker :)

On Dec 6, 2010, at 11:05 AM, Max Bolingbroke wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> On 6 December 2010 01:57, Iavor Diatchki <iavor.diatchki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am doing some work on a GHC branch and I am having a lot of troubles
>> (and spending a lot of time) trying to keep my branch up to date with HEAD,
>> so I would be very grateful for any suggestions by fellow developers of how
>> I might improve the process.
> 
> Unfortunately I don't have any useful advice on how to avoid the
> problem. I've found exactly the same issues for every GHC branch I've
> ever developed, but haven't found a nice workaround.
> 
> I'd really like to see some solution though. Back in the day this is
> the reason that I pushed for moving GHC to Git (though that process
> sort of ran out of steam), and I still think that would be a good
> move, but any sort of solution would be good.
> 
> Cheers,
> Max
> 
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