(My apologies for my English: Although I can read English is difficult for me to write).
During the past months I have studied the various version control systems, and in the end, I decided to use DARCS because I think it follows the correct path through the theory of patches. So, as a new user, I welcome DARCS 2, and appreciate the tremendous effort made by David Roundey and all contributors. After that effort, I understand that David Roundy is tired and seek more contributors in his announcement of version 2: "...It means that if darcs is to continue to improve, we need new contributors..." I would love to be able to contribute to the development of DARCS kernel, but I'm not a Haskell programmer (Haskell is a nice language but... perhaps there are few DARCS contributors because there are few Haskell programmers). I, myself, work in the Microsoft.Net framework and therefore I can only contribute in the development of a tool. What tool? Programmers are comfortable with the command shell, but I work with HTML Web designers... after a few unsuccessful attempts to use de command shell, I taught them to use TortoiseDARCS for windows. During two months, Web Designers have been using TortoiseDARCS and I must say that it works relatively well with DARCS 1 repositories (now old-fashioned), but it doesn't recognize hashed and DARCS 2 experimental repositories (TortoiseDarcs marks them as repositories, but commands fail). Apart from that, TortoiseDARCS is too oriented to SVN and does not take the main characteristics of DARCS, and it seems that the development of TortoiseDARCS stands in its pilot phase for two years. In short: it would be great to have a good visual browser for web designers, translators, etc.. (a Visual Studio and Web Expression plugin would be great too...). Therefore I would like to contribute developing a genuine DARCS browser for Windows (and Linux too, through the Mono Framework). But I find a first difficulty to do so: as far as I know, DARCS has no API. Well, that is not an insurmountable difficulty: commands are DARCS API and we can start a cmd.exe process for each operation reading command answers from standardOutput or StandardError (and writing to StandardInput, if necessary). But there appears the next challenge: except for commands that have xml output, we need to parse the command output free text... well, this is complicated but neither is insurmountable. In relation to the above, I have three questions: 1. Does anyone know if there is already a similar development project? 2. Does anyone know a better method to develop a DARCS Explorer? (I thought to directly read the repository, but it would be like partially reprogramming DARCS kernel). 3. Does anyone know if there are Schemas, DTDs or similar for xml-output options? 4. Does anyone know if there is a list for "tools developers"? Thanks Santiago Estrada _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
