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

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Thu, 9 Dec 2010, Simon Marlow wrote:

> 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?

Sadly, no.

>> 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.

My feeling is that a bridge should be quite feasible and would offer those 
contributors who want it the opportunity to do their GHC development in 
git and only use darcs when submitting their final changes or when working 
in unbridged repos. I'm not too familiar with the structure of the GHC 
repo but I suspect that only a few of the subrepos are big or active 
enough that darcs is really painful.

Cheers,

Ganesh