Le 09/11/2010 20:20, Stephen J. Turnbull a écrit : > Florent Becker writes: > > > I think our mileage varies wildly given that Bazaar and Python have > > comfortable market-shares, whereas darcs is an underdog with precious > > few contributors. > > Nobody has enough contributors. YMMV, but that's not why. > Yes, I should not have pointed at the contributors, but the market-share is a real difference. To say it otherwise, Python or Bazaar have (or are closer to) a critical mass of users that ensures the current developpers stay motivated (or get paid to contribute) and that they have prospective new developpers (we're not doing too badly on that count, but I think it's a part where innovating is important). That critical mass of users also means that they get more indirect benefits from third parties, like support in IDEs… If eclipse does not support git (does it?), it's eclipse's problem. If it does not support darcs, it's our problem.
> > Increasing the time to market for new features will not be viable > > for developper motivation, > > That's very likely true. Sad, but true. > > > nor for public relations: the only way we can exist is if we show > > that innovation still exists in VCS (with respect to the git/hg/bzr > > state-of-the-art), and that darcs is where (some of it) happens. > > On the one side, the statement is false; there are plenty of not > terribly innovative projects that do quite well: take the Emacsen for > one example. Yes, but they have a critical mass of users. > On the other side, it's trivial to show that Darcs is > where some VCS innovation happens: Darcs is still the only VCS that > can say "we do cherry-pickin' right!" OK, David did that and you > can't really claim credit for that in the 2.x series, but that's a > developer issue. > It's a capital we cannot live on eternally. > Ask your users, see what they say. If Zooko says "Darcs isn't > innovating fast enough, and I'm thinking about switching to git for > that reason", I'd be worried, too. But I don't think he'll say that. Well, he might very well say "oh, I want eclipse integration", and kiss us goodbye once a coworker shows him hg has got cherry picking a bit less wrong than it initially did¹. Only fanboys value innovation per se, but if new features do not come to darcs, and come to other vcs, and the cost of switching goes down, then at some point, the cost of not-switching prevails. Also, as I said earlier, showing that new stuff happens is vital in terms of getting new developpers. Florent ¹: this is speculation on the future, of course (or is it?) _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list darcs-users@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
