What about the idea of creating a GUI interface to darcs? I love the
command line as much as the next guy, but I think darcs could really
benefit from a polished GUI. I used tortoise darcs on a small project
a while ago and it was pretty nice, but I think there is potential for
much better.
I think that if darcs had a usable GUI then it would be a great
advantage over other its competitors and it could tremendously
increase its user base.
I have been thinking about making a gtk2hs darcs frontend for a while
now, what does everyone think about this?
On Fri, Aug 1, 2008 at 6:45 PM, 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, _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe