[darcs-devel] status of darcsden repo

Ben Franksen ben.franksen at online.de
Wed Feb 19 09:30:35 UTC 2020


Am 19.02.20 um 09:10 schrieb Ganesh Sittampalam:
> On 18/02/2020 23:38, Ben Franksen wrote:
>> My reservations against the idea are of a more principled nature.
>>
>> Maintaining a web service is not our core business. We have enough to do
>> with darcs proper. And even if this weren't the case, it would still be
>> a violation of "do one thing and do it well". It would also "bless"
>> darcsden as the one default darcs hosting service implementation,
>> discouraging others (and ourselves) from writing something new that uses
>> e.g. the command line interface of darcs (hypothetical at the moment, I
>> know, but see e.g. darcsweb which is quite simple and still works,
>> mostly); or perhaps something that directly works with the on-disk
>> representation (which is in fact rather more stable than the current "API").
> 
> I guess my view is that maintaining a web UI (which is also intended for
> local use, not just the hosting service) should be part of our core
> business, particularly given that noone else is doing it at present.

I didn't mean "not our business" in the sense of "it is somebody else's
problem". I rather meant that darcsden contains lots of code that has
nothing to do with darcs per se.

Besides, I don't feel confident to review patches to darcsden. I don't
understand most of the code in darcsden either.

Most importantly we need an easy(!) way to test darcsden.

>> We both noticed that basing darcsden on darcslib which has *no*
>> distinction between public and private parts is highly problematic and
>> was perhaps not the best idea to begin with. What you propose amounts to
>> coupling them even tighter. If you notice that patients are dying from
>> your medicine, the solution is not to increase the dose.
> 
> I think if we had a larger ecosystem, having a good API would be a much
> larger priority. But we don't, and I don't think it's primarily because
> we've never had a good API. Out of the three external interfaces -
> command-line, web UI, API - I'd like to have all three, but given
> limited time I'd prefer to focus more on the first two. At the moment we
> are giving the command-line interface a lot more attention than the web
> UI, at least in terms of keeping it working.

I think that concentrating on a better interface between darcsden and
darcs, including a better internal separation between the actual UI and
the core, would greatly benefit code quality in darcs itself. It
certainly means more immediate work but it will more than pay off in the
long run.

Cheers
Ben
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