[darcs-users] [Haskell-cafe] Re: poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

[Max Battcher]

Ashley Moran wrote:
> What GitHub does really well is build a community around the repos.   
> They could have used Hg or bzr or pretty much and DVCS and been as  
> successful, but they (unfortunately) chose git.

I feel bad because I predicted just about everything that GitHub does 2 
years ago, but have had a snail's pace in comparison (I'm a student and 
it's a side project), if anyone with a Python and Django Framework 
interest wants a Darcs-related project to hack on (or otherwise 
support), I've got a lot of ideas and some work in progress code that I 
would be willing to lead towards near-GitHub-ness.

I've got some changes I've been planning to do ASAP (important 
refactoring for Darcs 2 support, plus post-nfa merge changes, if you 
know Django), but I've been waiting until I do a Darcs 2 conversion of 
the repository (which I've been waiting until I figure out how to get a 
working Darcs 2 on my debian virtual server), and so I'd been waiting 
for after the conversion to again attempt to recruit co-developers...

(If you want to see something of the current state it's self-hosting at 
http://darcsforge.code.worldmaker.net/ for now.  Planning to migrate it 
over to self.darcsforge.org once it gets closer to 
"shippable"/"marketable"...)

Lately I've been excited because Darcs 2 is particularly wonderful to 
build a better, cheaper GitHub-like system against, thanks to the 
DARCS_PATCHES_XML posthook environment variable, the global cache and 
the contributed ability to do a ``darcs send`` directly as an HTTP POST. 
  With POST support I think that projects could get away with never 
worrying about an SSH jail and instead I'd just write some nice Patch 
management code (which has been on my agenda for a while anyway, because 
a smart patch manager could be shared with an issue tracker, forum 
software, Trac+Darcs perhaps, or whatever else people might want to 
attach patches to).

Just some of my thoughts on the subject,

--
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/