Hello, A Haskeller by the name of John Macfarlane has created a nice wik engine in Haskell on top of Happs and a distributed version control system. You can see it here or read the original release announcement: http://johnmacfarlane.net:5001/ http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell-cafe/2008-November/050336.html
Now, it just so happens that the backend isn't Darcs, but I thought I read somewhere that the author is open to having a darcs backend if we provide a programmatic way to invoke darcs (aka libdarcs). Given that the wiki is using a vcs in the background it is possible to author pages using just the version control backend. Also it supports code snippets with syntax highlighting and LaTeX math stuff and exports to tons of formats (including latex, meaning PDF output probably isn't a hard feature to add if it could be done server side from the latex output). Internally it uses Pandoc making the input and output possibilities quite numerable. reST is even an option; but it seems markdown is the default input type. So, this is me publicly suggesting that we consider, or evaluate, the potential use of gitit for the darcs project. Here are some of the reasons why I think this is a good idea: 1) Assuming that the darcs project is user #0 of libdarcs this could be used to give us user #1. 2) Trent has mentioned he would like a wiki engine that can be used without a web browser on multiple occasions. 3) With support for both Haskell code and math we could potentially move the entire manual, including patch theory sections, to the wiki reducing the barrier to documentation authoring beyond the current threshold. 4) We could script the creation of the pdf manual from the wiki content, same with the manpages. 5) In my opinion the existing feature set of gitit makes it superior already to what we are currently using. Potential problems: a) gitit is still young. b) libdarcs isn't ready *today* to be the backend. c) Porting the existing wiki content. For (a) maybe we should play it safe and wait X months? How about X = 3-6 to see if gitit needs to stabilize? For (b) I'd say git is popular and respectable, but I think we should dogfood our own vcs whenever we can because of the message that sends. This means we need to figure out how to get libdarcs to work for gitit and find out if John would be okay maintaining a backend layer for libdarcs. I bet we could find a way to automate, or mostly, automate (c). What do others think? Thanks! Jason
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