RFC: migrating to git

[David Peixotto]

On Jan 10, 2011, at 5:19 AM, Simon Marlow wrote:
> 
> 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?

+1 for moving to git

As an infrequent contributor I would welcome the move to git. I think the biggest advantage from my perspective would be enabling branches which I have avoided up to now because of the painful process I hear about from others.

Another possible advantage to git would be its support for submodules[1]. If we made the switch to git for all the repositories that GHC uses, then we could set them up as submodules. The advantage of submodules is that the GHC repo would contain pointers to the exact commit needed in the remote repository, and they would be under version control. Having submodules for the other repos would be similar to the darcs_all script, but would not have the danger of leaving [dangling pointers][2] when making a new branch.

[1] http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-submodule.html 
[2] http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/cvs-ghc/2010-November/057573.html