Re: GHC and Darcs

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Op 31-jul-2008, om 20:06 heeft Eric Y. Kow het volgende geschreven:

>> On the other hand, Ian has also contributed a grand total of one line
>> of code to darcs since he started work on ghc, so this isn't a strong
>> case that ghc is contributing to darcs.
>
> Hey! Let's bounce off this note and Max's "energy" questions, to work
> out how we can do a better job of attracting developers and keeping  
> them.
>
> I think we need to target Haskellers.  Maybe a good informal (if  
> cheesy)
> poll to take on the Haskell Café is to have them complete this  
> sentence:
>
>   I would contribute to darcs if only...
I haven't seen the question yet on haskell-cafe, but I have an answer  
so I'm giving it here.

I've tried to contribute to darcs a bit a few months ago, because I'm  
a darcs user, I had some time on my hands and I'd noticed that darcs  
was a bit underpowered. But I have to say that I was disappointed by  
what I could do. If I wanted to fix something, I'd have to dig  
through many many source files only to find out that I was looking in  
the wrong place.

poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

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!

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

I would contribute to darcs if only

It didn't already do exactly what I want it to.

As you've said darcs is really good for small-to-medium sized projects, particularly with few developers.
Those are exactly the projects I happen to be working on. For my work I use darcs on a slightly larger project
but with (mainly) only one developer (me). So basically because darcs works perfectly for me I have pretty
little motivation to dive into the source code and 'fix' something which for me simply isn't broken.

regards
allan

Eric Kow 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..."
> 
> 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 University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.

darcs patch: Fixed typo

Fri Aug  1 18:24:27 CEST 2008  lele <at> nautilus.homeip.net
  * Fixed typo

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darcs-users mailing list
darcs-users <at> darcs.net
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Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

I'd love to see a git-gui like interface to darcs.

Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

On 2008 Aug 1, at 11:45, Eric Kow 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..."

The darcs2 announcement strongly suggested that darcs would no longer  
be developed.  This was brought up in the #ghc discussion about  
whether to switch.

--

-- 
brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery <at> kf8nh.com
system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery <at> ece.cmu.edu
electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university    KF8NH

Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

Eric Kow 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..."
> 
> 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?

...I knew how to help (and had the time).

The You Too Can Hack on Darcs blog series is a really good idea. One 
problem many open-source projects suffer from is it not being apparent 
how a new hacker would even begin to start working. An overview of how 
the project is set up along with some notice about how malleable the 
different parts are goes a long way.

It can also be helpful to take some RFI and walk through implementing 
the change, testing that it hasn't broken anything, and sending the 
patch (don't forget this step :). A follow on about getting ideas from 
the bug tracker is also good. Sometimes hands-on documentation is the 
best kind. Also documenting how a ninja developer could drop in, fix 
some things, and leave before anyone noticed is a good way to snare the 
folks who'd like to help a little but don't want to get dragged into 
being a regular developer (yet). Try-before-you-buy contributing is one 
of the best ways to get regular developers.

Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

Hi

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

> The darcs2 announcement strongly suggested that darcs would no longer be
> developed.  This was brought up in the #ghc discussion about whether to
> switch.

I agree strongly with this. I would be much more likely to contribute
if the project seemed active and alive. The darcs 2.0 announcement
read like an obituary, and that put me off. The impression I came away
with (accurate or not), was that the entire program had been
rewritten, I was going to gain incompatibilities, and be using an
untried/tested version which was not going to get any support. The
message also seemed to be threatening me that if I didn't upgrade you
would break into my house and wipe my data - instead of the usual
enticement with cool new features 

[Of course, a few emails/blog comments/interactions with Eric has
shown me there is some life in the project - but I think a lot of
people get jumpy when it comes to version control software]

One thing that might help is splitting bits of darcs into libraries.
There have been various things in darcs which are now separate
libraries - ByteString and FilePath both have/had parallels in darcs.
By making a separate library you get a better documented interface, a
cleaner separation of concerns, and people can contribute small
patches to self-contained elements, rather than a big application. You
also provide additional benefits to the general community 

darcs 2 infinite loop

I have repository 'cabal-install' ~5.5mb
If calling command "darcs pull -a" darcs buzz using 100% CPU

OS: WinXP Home Ru + sp3
darcs: 2.0.1rc2 (2.0.1rc2 (+ -1 patch)) from 
http://www.haskell.org/~simonmar/darcs.exe and from 
http://zooko.com/darcs/darcsdir-w32-2.0.0.zip

Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

Hi,

"Eric Kow" <eric.kow <at> gmail.com> writes:
>    "I would contribute to darcs if only..."
... I got around to it, which I hopefully will soon? Let me try and we'll
see. (I still have one project standing between me and darcs, but that should
fall by the road soon, time-consumption-wise.)

> 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!
I think it is also partly due to configuring xmonad sort of leading you on to
its actual code. It's just a little step from configuring to contributing. And
most users do configure the WM, I suppose.

Not sure that's applicable to darcs at all, though.

Yours,
   Petr.

--

-- 
Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com
 http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net

"In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be
 indented six feet downward and covered with dirt."
     -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation