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

[Luke Palmer]

On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 3:45 PM, Eric Kow <eric.kow at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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..."
>

I haven't used darcs much, so it's possible that I'll be forced to start
contributing by my own binding hypothetical.

I would contribute to darcs if only it had support / could have support for
splitting and merging repositories.  For example, I like to work in a big
repository of all my stuff ever, because most of the things I do rarely
exceed an experiment in one file.  But once something does get big enough to
be interesting, I want to split it off into its own repository.  But that's
just the use case: doing it the git way (go through all patches, discard
irrelevant ones, filter relevant ones, thus losing all correlation with the
original repository) is not going to inspire me; I'd like to see support for
it in the beautiful patch theory.

Luke


>
> 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,
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>
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