Jason wrote: > > > From anecdotal evidence (about four samples now), the most common reason > > for people to try darcs and then decide not to use it is that they can't > > get it compiled. > > Zooko, you forgot to say YMMV :) When I talk to people and ask them 1) if > they have tried darcs, 2) if they liked it, I get a different response than > that. When they answer (1) they usually say things like, "Ew, it's written in > haskell..." or "Gosh, I have to try out yet another tool...". So they tend > to either assume Haskell has terrible performance or they are put off by the > idea of having to learn some new tool (they assume the learning will be > painful).
I have the same experience with people who have not tried darcs yet. People have a strong feeling that learning a new revision control tool is going to be a painful experience. Except for the compilation issue and the w32 configuration issues, darcs is not. :-) But among people who have actually tried darcs, I have not talked to anyone who then stopped using it for the reasons that your informants gave (as far as I recall). So our observations are mostly compatible -- the main reasons that people don't try darcs is that the think it will be painful to learn and they think that there is something fishy about Haskell. The main reasons that people who have tried darcs abandon the attempt is that they couldn't get it compiled. (In fact, about five minutes after submitting that bug report, I talked to yet another person on IRC who said "Screw this!" when he couldn't get GHC compiled on Solaris. I asked him if he was aware of the web page listing precompiled binaries, and he was not. He thanked me for the URL. So chalk it up to about 5 observed people on my part instead of the about 4 that I earlier reported.) By the way, I've now submitted a patch to the web page which will hopefully reduce the frequency of this problem. Regards, Zooko _______________________________________________ darcs-devel mailing list [email protected] http://www.abridgegame.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/darcs-devel
