[Haskell-cafe] poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

[Eric Kow]

Dear Haskellers,

I would like to take an informal poll for the purposes of darcs
recruitment.  Could you please complete this sentence for me?

   "I would contribute to darcs if only..."

The answers I am most interested in hearing go beyond "... I had more
time".  For instance, if you are contributing to other Haskell/volunteer
projects, why are you contributing more to them, rather than darcs?







The context:

Lately, darcs has suffered a setback: the GHC team has decided that it
is now time to switch to a different system, like git or Mercurial.
This is probably a good thing for GHC and for us.  By the way, good
luck to them, and thanks for everything! (better GHC == better darcs)

But where is darcs going?  For now, we are going to have to focus on
what we do best, providing precision merging and a consistent user
interface for small-to-medium sized projects.  I want more, though!  I
want to see darcs 2.1 come out next year, performance enhanced out the
wazoo, and running great on Windows.  And I want to see Future Darcs,
the universal revision control system, seamlessly integrating with
everybody else.

We need to learn to do better so that darcs can achieve this kind of
wild success.  For example, whereas darcs suffers from the "day job"
problem, xmonad has had to turn developers away!

As Don mentions, this is partly thanks to their extreme accessibility
(better self-documentation).  But does anyone have more specific ideas
about things we need to change so that you can contribute to darcs?
How do we hit critical hacker mass?

I have jotted down some other thoughts here regarding recruitment here:
  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Recruitment

In the meantime, if you have been discouraged from hacking on darcs,
we want to know why, and how we can change things!

Thanks,