Dan Pascu wrote:
On Monday 13 April 2009, Eric Kow wrote:
On Mon, Apr 13, 2009 at 14:46:05 +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
Before I say anything else, are you happy with "patch reordering"? I
can go for that if you think it's really better.
I can't speak for Stephen, but "patch reordering" seems to have the
right mix of conveying what we mean without making it sound magical or
hyped up.
I tried to think of what "patch reordering" can convey to me if I would be
a new user and had no idea of the things I know now. To be honest it
means ...nothing. At the same time it escapes me how reordering patches
can help me or why would it be useful. Not only that, but it may even
sound an alarm in my head if I'm used to all the other history based
revision control systems out there. The VCS reordering the history of my
repository without my consent? Why would anyone want that?
The term "patch reordering" does not sit in isolation. The front page I
designed with Eric's and Stephen's input should address all of those
concerns very effectively. I recommend reading the latest posts on the list.
So I think you must put something intriguing in the description, something
to motivate people to dwell into it and learn more.
Without necessarily agreeing with the "intriguing" part (in case we
don't agree on what that word means) I feel confident that the front
page I wrote motivates people to dwell into it and learn more.
Another thing that captivated my attention was the idea that patches were
central to the darcs philosophy, unlike revisions with the other VCSs.
This appealed to me as a more natural approach, because this is how humans
function. We think of a bug fix or a feature we implement as a patch that
moves the tree to a new state.
The new pages I wrote drive home this point very effectively. Please
read the latest points on the list. Both the front page and the "Patch
Reordering" page make a big deal of how natural Darcs' approach is, and
how "Darcs thinks the way you think".
Even nowadays, I find the darcs user interface to be the best available.
Just as a comparison, many distributed VCS out there have almost if not
over 100 (one hundred!) commands. That's insane. The closest that comes
to darcs in this regard is mercurial which still has almost twice as many
commands as darcs.
I think I'll reuse some of this on the website! :-D
IMO, you cannot represent a concept as patch commutation in a short
description of darcs meant for newcomers, no matter how you dress it up
to make it newbie friendly.
You'd be surprised what can be done when you have a skilled writer in
the team. I have much experience explaining complex technical concepts
to inexperienced newcomers (first as a teacher, then as a writer). I
have often found effective ways to explain things that others thought
were impossible to explain to a newcomer. It takes a lot of time and
hard work, but IMO the results are worth it.
Daniel.
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