github? [Re: [Agda] Agda development]

[Jan Stolarek]

> Of course, if the main developer can learn another vc, so
> could the contributors...
True. But as I pointed out git becomes a standard, while darcs disappears. I feel that most 
potential contributors will just not care to learn darcs.

> Also, people say that keeping forks and merging conflicts is easier with git than darcs.
I haven't worked with darcs (other than some basics to pull out a repo), but indeed working with 
branches and merging is painless in git (once you learn what you're doing!). That said, pull 
requests and merging offered by github, while easy to use and convenient, should be IMO avoided. 
They create a lot of unnecessary empty merge commits that obscure repo's history.

> But keep in mind that the biggest hurdle to contribution will not vanish
> by a move to git:  The complexity of the Agda implementation itself...
According to github GHC has 115 contributors. Idris, after just two years, has 51 contributors -  
half of them with less than 5 commits, which shows that people who aren't regular developers 
still can commit small fixes. I don't think Agda is much more complex than any of these two 
compilers (am I wrong here?) and could also get a lot of people contributing.

That said, who is in charge here? :-) I mean who can make the decission to move from Darcs to 
github?

Janek