Sven Panne
Our main problem here is not technical, it is simply a lack of a decent test suite for all the library packages in the repository. And I totally agree with Jacques here: As long as we don't have this test suite, I'll furiously object to 'allow everyone to just commit'. This will simply not work and will actually turn away much more people from Haskell due to the resulting instability and API volatility than attract people to our beloved language.
While I mostly agree with what you're saying, as a point of clarity, I want to mention that darcs does _not_ "allow everyone to commit" and therefore won't have the impact upon stability that you are worrrying about. Darcs allows any user to commit to their own local repository, and makes it easy to merge changes between repositories and send changes upstream. There would still be a central / official repository that would be stable (well, as stable as our CVS repo is now).
I see a dire need for more Haskell *maintainers*, not for more developers or brand new shiny version control systems. With "maintainers" I mean people accepting/testing/merging patches, discussing with people about APIs, kicking coders to write tests for their code, collecting opinions and writing down API proposals, keeping existing APIs stable/sane/usable, etc. This is a lot of work, it's difficult, time-consuming and much less fun than coding, but we need those people.
I totally agree with this.
Darcs won't help with this at all...
I'm not sure of this, but I do agree with Simon about attracting folks. peace, isaac