[darcs-users] darcs patch: add exception to haskell_policy.sh for D... (and 61 more)

[Ganesh Sittampalam]

On Fri, 31 Oct 2008, David Roundy wrote:

> Performance patches are *always* low priority, and should therefore
> should only be made when they are both certain to be correct

Please could you clarify what you mean by that? Much optimisation work 
will never be "certain to be correct". For example, the darcs annotate 
cache work will inevitably be too complicated to satisfy that criterion. 
Even the recent series of patches I submitted, which were all quite 
"local" in some sense, still needed some testing to shake out bugs, and 
there's certainly no absolute guarantee that there are none left.

In addition, I have to say that I find your attitude quite discouraging. 
It might perhaps be helpful if you would elucidate your priorities and 
attitudes as unstable maintainer, so that it's clear to everyone what 
criteria they are working to when they contribute patches to you. For 
example, I don't think I'd have bothered with any of my recent patches had 
I known that you would consider them "low priority". What do you consider 
important, beyond bug fixes? What about new features? If your vision for 
darcs is simply to keep it in maintenance mode, then please be up front 
about it. If not, then I think you need to recognise that blanket 
statments like that are quite off-putting.

> and have been tested to actually improve performace.

In case it's not clear, I do agree with this, and I apologise for some of 
my recent sloppiness in this area.

Ganesh