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

[Ashley Moran]

On Aug 03, 2008, at 3:36 pm, David Bremner wrote:

> I think this view is probably coloured by your background in web
> development. I have used git for about a year now, and never visited
> GitHub.  I'm not saying you have to like git, but it does have other
> features other than a snazzy web site.

Hi David

I think I gave the wrong impression there.  After all, I use darcs  
despite it not having a snazzy website!  What I mean is that git usage  
has snowballed since GitHub was released, so people are clearly  
attracted to the website first, and the SCM second.  It's a bit like  
the way Rails created thousands of Ruby programmers by association,  
many of them with no idea what Ruby was all about, just a vague notion  
that Rails could solve their problem.

Ultimately my point is I think that MercurialHub or BazaarHub  
(BazaarBazaar?) would have been as successful.


> I do agree that adoption of development tools is driven by network
> effects.  When I chose a DVCS to learn, I only wanted to learn one, so
> I chose the one that seemed like it had the most momentum. The rich
> get richer...

I tend to very stubbornly work the other way... choose the tool I  
think works best with very little regard for its momentum, unless of  
course it clearly has none.  Hence my love of darcs and recent  
interest in Haskell.  (I'll figure it out, one day!)


> Maybe the answer is to work on Darcs-git :-)

Well that's been looked at before... unfortunately it's been abandoned  
now.

There's also discussion on darcs-users that a Haskell implementation  
of Git would finally settle the "Haskell is too slow" debate.  Now I  
think if the world is going to use git, a better implementation would  
be a good thing (I know a developer who got VERY frustrated trying to  
program against it).  Personally I think the developer time would be  
better invested in fixing darcs bugs and improving its performance.


Ashley


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