Hi everyone, I guess I should say a few words about this :-)
First I'd like to thank Eric for his work as a maintainer for 7 years, and hope he'll stick around! For the observers that might wonder what is going to change for the Darcs project, the answer is: not much. Ever since I started participating to Darcs (2009, my first sprint attendance :,-) ), I found the project to be very collaborative and consensus-lead. Anyone is welcome to send patches, code reviews are public and are a great opportunity to learn about Darcs' codebase; release management duties have been shared between several members over time; coding sprints are open for participation, and indeed, every time we have a few non-darcsers visiting us and helping. I am very happy with these aspects of Darcs as a free software project, and Eric ensured all of this happened over the years. So, things will continue as before! As for Darcs the software, how is it going to evolve? I cannot answer this question alone for the long term. What I can say, is that in the past I sometimes found Darcs' evolution as being a little too slow and conservative. We lost valuable energy and focus in decisions which did not pay off eventually. On some topics we did not reach any conclusion and sticked to the status quo. My guess is that this drove a few hackers to stop contributing, while the users also left anyway! I don't mean that we're going to break everything just to make us developers happy. The very nature of Darcs leads us to be conservative: Darcs is not just a software but also a data format (Darcs repositories) which we don't want to change unless we have a *really* good reason to do so. Also, Darcs handles other people's data, so we want it to be safe and predictable. On the other hand, I think we should really commit to the transitions we set ourselves to do, and remember that developer energy is a scarce resource. Now for the short term, what is going to happen? We had a big 2.10 release last April, 3 years after 2.8. It included a lot of new stuff, which made us very happy; but the release process was consequently quite long. I'd like the next release to happen sooner and I propose myself to take care of it for a second time. The release process will start after the GHC 8 release and the next sprint, which means February. Happy hacking! Guillaume _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list darcs-users@darcs.net http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
