[darcs-users] GHC and Darcs

[zooko]

On Jul 30, 2008, at 15:39 PM, Don Stewart wrote:

>  a) darcs is lacking clear project direction and energy, which is
>     slowing down our project, and slowing dev uptake.


I am reminded of the lesson from The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ 
ar01s02.html

     5. When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is  
to hand it off to a competent successor.

It seems to me that David Roundy has lost interest in improving darcs  
and is interested only in maintaining it.  This is demonstrated most  
clearly by his lackluster release announcements for darcs 2.0 and  
2.0.2.  One of the duties of a project leader is, basically, to be  
excited about the project and to communicate that excitement to  
others in the release announcements.  I don't think David is into  
that anymore.

He deserves, of course, all of our thanks for what he has already  
accomplished.  I hope someone else will offer to take over leadership  
of darcs and that David will encourage such people to grow into that  
role and that he'll hand over the keys of commit access to them.  At  
the very least, let us nominate someone else to write the next  
release announcement.  ;-)

Other than the lack of enthusiasm in the leadership role, I don't  
think darcs is in such bad shape, from an open-source-project  
perspective.  There are some talented people who have fun hacking on  
it, and it works fine for small projects.  I am interested in the  
technical question of why darcs-2-format repositories perform worse  
than darcs-1-format repositories on the ghc code base.

Regards,

Zooko