On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 4:34 PM, David Roundy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 09:03:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote: > > If you're unwilling to support the test scripts on some platform, > > Possibily you should go all the way and declare that Darcs is not > > supported at all on that platform, even if it happens to work. > > No, that's ridiculous. Darcs is supported on any platform on which users > compile it and help us fix errors by reporting them. Removing the human > element from darcs' development process is not a useful plan. Nor is > reducing the human element to droundy a useful plan. Platforms on which > noone cares to try out darcs are not platforms on which I care to port > darcs.
Another way to think about this (one that I think encompasses both your view points) is that in an open source project such as darcs, the "support" comes from volunteers. David is suggesting we need more volunteers (not just buildbots) to support those platforms. Stephen is suggesting that we allow darcs to work on those platforms, but is not unofficially supported. Meaning, it will likely work, but there may be things that break for which we don't (currently) have a volunteer for. Both of you are really getting at a similar point. We really could use more people who know about integrating software with other software, such as various operating systems to step forward and help support things. Perhaps it's time to create a small table listing which platforms darcs has been reported to work on and the level of "support" we have for those platforms. Since darcs meets my needs on the platforms I use and I too have darcs bugs/features that I'm more useful (or just more interested in) working on, I doubt I'll create such a table, but I would encourage someone to do so and place it on the darcs wiki. Maybe seeing that someone's favorite platform is lacking a high level of support will inspire him/her to step forward. This reminds me of binary patches. At some point, someone really needs to implement a binary diff but since David and many of the other regular darcs devs don't need this, it's never been "supported". I think it is unfortunate that many people who are open source contributors and enjoy using darcs never send in a patch to improve darcs. I've spoken to many people on freenode that use the excuse they don't know Haskell. Well, I assure you, none of the darcs devs were born knowing Haskell :) But more importantly, not all of the useful ways of helping involve knowing Haskell. Haskell only happens to be the language that most of darcs is implemented in. The repository also contains C, Perl, LaTeX, Bash and English. If you know any of those languages, there is a good chance there is some aspect of darcs that could use a few hours of volunteer work to improve. There are also tools that could be written to help support project management based around darcs repositories. Such as good patch tracking tools for mailing lists. There have been a few debates on darcs-devel and darcs-user lists about how such tools should work or whether they should be used by darcs maintainers, but picking any of the option permutations would ultimately help darcs even if darcs HQ didn't adopt them, simply by making darcs nicer for users who do adopt them. I guess my whole point with this is simply, darcs has limited volunteer developer resources but you can help mitigate that restriction by contributing a few hours here and there. And "Thank you!" to anyone who has done this. Thanks, Jason _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
