Dear darcs users and Haskell hackers, Earlier I wrote an announcement for the darcs hacking sprint on 25-26 October. Tonight, I am delighted to announce that we have two venues confirmed for the sprint and one serious offer. Venues ------ We plan to host the sprint across three sites: * CONFIRMED: Brighton, UK (University of Brighton) * CONFIRMED: Portland, USA (Galois Connections) * likely: Paris, France (Université Paris Diderot) So if you were waiting to book tickets, this is the time! For more details, please see http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/Sprints Agenda ------ During this first sprint, we shall be focusing our attention on the day to day performance issues that darcs users commonly face. This is what we are reaching for: 1. Fast network operations. We want to make it very pleasant for users to darcs get a repository and pull some patches to it over http and ssh. Git does this very well, and we plan to learn from them. 2. Cutting memory consumption. We want to profile the heck out of operations like darcs record, darcs convert and darcs whatsnew. What's eating up all the memory? And how can we can cut it down to size? 3. Responsiveness. Sometimes basic darcs commands can take long enough for programmers to lose their train of thought. We want to track down these lost seconds and kill that dreaded context switch. Of course, if you are interested in other areas, then you can work on those instead. Note that if you are new to the darcs code or to Haskell, there will also be a lot interesting jobs for you to get started with. Everyone will have something to hack on, so come join us! Thanks very much to the University of Brighton, Galois connections and University of Paris VII for their generous offers. Hope to see you there, everyone! :-) -- Eric Kow http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9