[darcs-devel] The future maintenance of darcs (was: GHC's darcs evaluation wiki page)

[Mark Stosberg]

David Roundy wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 09, 2008 at 09:24:50PM -0600, zooko wrote:
>> "Uncertain future: no critical mass of hackers/maintainers. The  
>> technical basis is not well enough understood by enough people."
>>
>> This is, of course, a prognostication or value judgment, but I  
>> disagree with it.  It was more true before the recent renewed  
>> interest in hacking on darcs-2.
> 
> I'm afraid I'd have to agree that this is a problem.  We definitely *don't*
> have a critical mass of hackers/maintainers, and there are too few people
> who understand how darcs works well enough to modify it.  My estimate is
> that by this time next year, darcs will be effectively unmaintained.  Of
> course, it's possible that I'm only pessimistic because I've been spending
> too much time working on darcs, but that alone ought to tell you
> something.

David,

You have certainly provided a tremendous gift and community service with 
your work on darcs so far, and it is fair that you take a break or walk 
away whenever you'd like.  Thank you.

Perhaps the post-2.0 focus should then on the maintainability of the 
code base while minor bug fixes and new features are on hold.

I personally expect to find Darcs 2.0 very usable and while I have some 
"wishes" of things to further improve, none are critical.

It certainly seems like Darcs has a lot of *users* now. At least, there 
is an impressive amount of feedback through the bug tracker. Since most 
users are programmers, and darcs is popular in the Haskell community, it 
certainly seems there is a reasonable size pool of *potential* helpers 
even if they are not currently active.

    Mark