Head broken again

[Roman Leshchinskiy]

Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
> 
> Our current plan (were you in the loop when we discussed this?) is to have a snapshot darcs repo, that is the last known clean build.  (Question: do we need one per architecture?)

Definitely one per architecture (and there doesn't seem to be a nightly 
build for OS X at the moment). But see below...

> If you had that, you'd be happy, right?  

Actually, I probably wouldn't. For instance, I only wanted to sync today 
to get your latest simplifier patches. Of course, I could have pulled 
only those but just pulling everything is much easier. And then there is 
the question of getting the right versions of libraries...

> You could just pull from that.  You wouldn't get the latest patches -- but you can't *both* have the latest patches *and* a known good build.

To be entirely honest, I don't see why I can't have both most of the 
time (I wouldn't mind too much if head was broken *occasionally*). I 
think simply testing potentially destabilising patches on multiple 
architectures before submitting/pushing them and clearly stating what 
has/hasn't been tested when submitting would go a long way towards that. 
For projects like the dynamic linking stuff, where testing probably 
happens gradually, a branch would perhaps be more appropriate. It does 
work (not perfectly, but definitely better) for other projects. Perhaps 
ghc has reached a threshold in the number of developers where a more 
controlled patch submission/application process is required.

Roman