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

[Simon Marlow]

On 08/12/2010 17:39, Yitzchak Gale wrote:

> Some of those are already in the works, and all except possibly
> (5) are known to be within reach. So the answer is yes, this
> problem is now on the verge of being solved in Darcs.

I think that might be a little overoptimistic.  The fundamental problem 
with darcs is that nobody understands the semantics.  Until there's a 
proper semantics that people can understand, I don't think the problems 
with merging and conflicts can really be fixed.  Even if the semantics 
can be nailed down, there are some difficult UI issues to solve.

We're not moving to v2 patches right now because we have enough 
experience with v1 to know how to avoid the bugs, but I'm less sure we 
could avoid the bugs in v2.  To the darcs folk: do you think this is 
unfounded paranoia?

> On the other hand, I suppose GHC HQ can't afford to have
> a revolt on their hands. So if the majority of people doing the
> actual work on GHC want to change to git and are willing to put
> in the effort to make the change, it will probably happen regardless.

Opinion on whether we should switch seems to be pretty evenly split at 
the moment (personally I'm agnostic).  Besides that, the main stumbling 
block is that the GHC tree consists of about 20 repos, with different 
maintainers, so making it so that a GHC developer only needs to use one 
VC tool could be tricky.

Cheers,
	Simon