[darcs-users] How to develop on a (GHC) branch with darcs

[Simon Peyton-Jones]

| thoroughly exhausted. Even when Darcs was in a far
| less advanced state than it is in now, the conclusion seemed
| to be that the best interests of the Haskell community at
| large are served by remaining with Darcs. So it would be a bit
| strange if this branching issue, which is a serious issue
| currently but will likely become a non-issue in a few months time,
| triggers GHC to abandon Darcs.

Let's not go overboard here.  Iavor was expressing his frustration with using Darcs, and that is useful information for the Darcs devs to have, so they know where to focus their efforts.  Already this thread has generated new useful information.  For example, Iavor knows about --skip-conflicts, and I know that things might be better in months not years.  Neither of us knew those things before.

For GHC, we have two strong incentives to stick with Darcs.  First, we use it at the moment and there'd be a lot of hoo-ha to change.  Second, Darcs is written by people in our community, and GHC is a big "customer", so I for one am keen to be supportive.

But we don't want to discourage people who'd like to help with GHC either.  For example, here is one response to the thread, from Tim Middleton:

| For the record, I can say that as a Haskell fan and someone who's using 
| Haskell at work (for small tools and projects), and as someone who'd like 
| to contribute to GHC (especially to the cross-compiler effort), having to 
| work with darcs is a very frustrating. 

The more everyone can do to understand what the frustration is, and to describe workflows that make it as easy as possible, the better.

Simon