RFC: migrating to git

[Trevor Elliott]

I am very interested in contributing to GHC, though the state of
development with darcs makes me hesitate.  A switch to git would make
contribution to the project much easier.

--trevor

On 01/10/2011 03:19 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> It's time to consider again whether we should migrate GHC development
> from darcs to (probably) git.
> 
> From our perspective at GHC HQ, the biggest problem that we would hope
> to solve by switching is that darcs makes branching and merging very
> difficult for us.  We have a few branches of HEAD that are very painful
> to keep merged with HEAD, and we would almost certainly have more
> branches if the overhead were lower.  In some sense the overhead is
> self-inflicted because we have the no-conflict policy in the mainline
> repository, but that is to avoid problems with darcs' merging algorithms
> (both performance and correctness).  We are still using darcs v1 patches
> rather than v2, but there are known problems with v2 which are
> preventing us from upgrading.
> 
> The darcs team have been making great strides with performance, but
> conflict handling remains a serious problem.  The darcs roadmap doesn't
> show this being fixed in the near future
> 
>   http://wiki.darcs.net/Roadmap
> 
> Rebase support is coming, and it does work, though the workflow is a bit
> laborious.
> 
> Besides the branching/merging/conflict issue, switching to git would
> give us plenty of side benefits, notably via access to a wealth of tool
> support.  Making contribution easy is important to us too, and there are
> a lot of people using git.
> 
> The cost of switching is quite high, which is one reason we decided to
> stay with darcs last time.  We have multiple repos that need to be
> converted, and for some of them, where the repo is being shared with
> other projects, we may have to mirror rather than convert in place.
> We're prepared to put in the effort if the gains would be worthwhile
> though (offers of help are more than welcome!).
> 
> 
> We're intrested in opinions from both active and potential GHC
> developers/contributors.  Let us know what you think - would this make
> life harder or easier for you?  Would it make you less likely or more
> likely to contribute?
> 
> Cheers,
>     Simon
> 
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