At Wed, 6 Aug 2008 06:29:32 +0100, Eric Y. Kow wrote: > > Dear Haskellers, >
> patch theory is still not defined clearly or rigorously enough for Haskellers Are the darcs developers familiar with these papers (available on citeseer): Undo Actions in Collaborative Work, Prakash & Knister 1992 Undoing Actions in Collaborative Work: Framework and Experience, Prakash & Knister 1994 The papers describe an undo mechanism for multiuser collaborative editing which sounds like how I imagine darcs patch theory to be (and, they even run into the dreaded exponential merge bug and propose a solution). They include some formal reasoning that may be easy to adapt to darcs? hope this helps, j. > Last Friday, I had posted a message asking how the darcs community > could a better job recruiting developers to hack on darcs. Thanks for > all the great responses! I am gratified by the suggestions you have > offered, as well as the recent uptick in community involvement. > > The responses so far fall along three themes: offering new features, > improving code accessibility and shaking up the community: > > Features > - GUI (david48, Bit Conner) > - splitting/merging (Luke Palmer, Ben Franksen) > - binary file handling (Jason Dusek) > - ... already does what I want (Allan Clark, Andrew Coppin) > > Code accessibility > - split into libs (Neil Mitchell) > - unit tests! (Ashley Moran) > - code documentation (Lele Gaifax) > - patch theory docs (Apfelmus, Ferenc Wagner) > - inherent simplicity of model, cf git (Austin Seipp) > > Community > - release announcements (Brandon Allbery, Neil Mitchell, Don Stewart) > - showing ways to help (Wren Ng Thorton, Ferenc Wagner) > - announcing our need for help (Wren Ng Thorton) > - easier entry point to darcs code, à la xmonad (Petr Rockai) > - more active leadership (Don Stewart, Lele Gaifax) > > One thing which is clear is that the darcs team have failed to > communicate effectively: the code is not as well-documented as it should > be, patch theory is still not defined clearly or rigorously enough for > Haskellers, the recent release announcements gave people the impression > that darcs was being abandoned, and we haven't made it clear that we > needed your help. > > We need your help > ----------------- > Hopefully one thing is clearer after this discussion. We definitely > need your help! > > What we need most of all are some Haskell optimisation gurus to join > the project, even in a minor way. Darcs 2 offers some huge improvements > in safety and core efficiency. Unfortunately, these improvements are > overshadowed by poor performance. Paradoxically speaking, darcs 2 just > isn't fast enough for people to notice how much faster it has gotten! > We need somebody to comb through our code and spot the silly things > which are making performance suffer. Is there something too strict? > Too lazy? Are going about IO completely the wrong way? > > There is no patch theory needed for this! Anybody with an eye for > performance should be able to rip into this code and find something > to fix. > > If you are not an optimisation guru, there are still loads of ways to > help. For starters, you could help us to improve our support for > Windows, or maybe some of the ProbablyEasy bugs: > > http://bugs.darcs.net/[EMAIL > PROTECTED],id,activity,status,assignedto&@filter=topic,status&topic=6&status=-1,1,2,3,4,5,6,7 > > We will communicate better > -------------------------- > The darcs 2 release announcement was very frank, but it also painted an > inaccurate picture of the situation. > > Here is a clearer picture: we are all still very interested in darcs and > want to keep using it! If you have a large repository and you cannot > wait for us to fix performance bugs, we wish you the best with git > (etc). But if darcs can handle your repository, we hope you stick > around. > > It is true that David is taking a lower profile, but this just means > that he is not following every discussion on the mailing list or > every new bug and feature request. David is still receiving patches > and reviewing them on a daily basis, providing the usual technical > insight. So keep sending those patches! > > That's all for now > ------------------ > I am going to leave things here for now, despite all the interesting > points we could still address and see where else the discussion leads. > In my next reply, I hope to address some of the more of suggestions you > have offered. > > Thanks again! > > -- > Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> > PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9 _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
