On Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 11:19 AM,
While it's true that xmonad-core has not had a lot of activity recently, that's not equally true of xmonad-contrib (which is the repository in question).
The original email said "repositories", so -core activity is relevant. But I disagree that XMC is active: even allowing for the recent flurry of dealing with backlogs and new patches (prompted by advocacy of moving to Git and Github entirely, which would make this discussion rather moot), we are still in a historically unprecedented stable period for XMC, a period with fewer patches committed than at any time since XMC was created in 2007: http://i.imgur.com/e3IfD.png If we restrict our attention to since 1 June 2012 (almost half a year ago): http://i.imgur.com/XkqBd.png You can literally count how many patches there have been (I count a grand total of 12) in those 169 days, which is 1 patch every 2 weeks (and a bit).
Additionally, your claim about what other people can do after upgrading the central repository doesn't mesh with my reading of the darcs documentation. Here's the scenario as I see it:
1. Person A upgrades repository A into A-2 2. Person B upgrades repository B into B-local-2 2. Person B clones repository A-2 into B-2
It's not clear that this results in a state where person B can transfer patches from repository B-local-2 into B-2. In particular, "darcs help convert" says,
"Furthermore, darcs 2 repositories created by different invocations of this command SHOULD NOT exchange patches, unless those repositories had no patches in common when they were converted."
I'm not clear on it either, but if their patches are that old, they can re-record - and probably should, since there must have been a reason they didn't send it in all those months/years ago, and this would encourage things like checking that it compiles when applied to a clean repo etc.
I'm talking about repository metadata here, not patch metadata. Repository metadata is not always copied during a convert or a clone. I fully believe that darcs-2 is capable of storing all the same data; just not that I, personally, know how to copy it from the old repository to the new one.
What repo metadata do you have in mind?
And please, the adversarial tone of this note really seems unwarranted. The darcs wiki itself recommends _not_ upgrading hashed darcs-1 repositories to darcs-2 repositories.
http://darcs.net/DarcsTwo doesn't so much recommend not upgrading as it recommends upgrading only if conflicts are a problem. Since there is advocacy for upgrading...
For long-lived private branches, better handling of conflicts is important... So which is it, #1 or #4? Are there long-lived private patches per #1 in which case #4 is wrong, or are there not, in which case #4 is right but #1 wrong?
Is it really so clear that there will be lots of conflicts from long-lived private patches...? I don't believe these things are really so mutually exclusive as you say.
The longer they last, the more they will conflict as they become ever more distant from the HEAD - and this is especially true since we're talking about such old hypothetical private versions. -- gwern http://www.gwern.net