[darcs-users] Re: Darcs advocacy

[Eric S. Johansson]

Charles Goodwin wrote:

> On Tue, 2004-06-08 at 12:58 +0100, Ganesh Sittampalam wrote:
> 
>>I would be careful about advocating it too early. Darcs is really cool,
>>but it is still rather flakey and (in my opinion) the merging behaviour is
>>not yet properly designed.
> 
> 
> The irony is that the industry standard is CVS.  Our experience of darcs
> has proven to be far smoother than our trials and tribulations with CVS.
> I submit that flakiness is relative, and that relative to the other
> products in the field (CVS, Arch, etc) Darcs cannot be classified as
> 'flakey'.

I would tend to agree.  I was driven to choose something other than CVS because of the constant security holes and sourceforge flakiness.  Where I do have problems, it's usually directly attributable to the fact that I only read the manual couple of times, late at night, in bed when I probably should have been sleeping.  For example, I'm having problems synchronizing repositories and changes with another member of the camram project.  It's probably entirely self-inflicted so I'm going to try more and read more before waving my hand and asking for help.

I think this highlights something else as well which is that we need more tutorials and guidance.  That's what I'm going through with the camram project.  You may make it simple within install script but if that script fails, you need to have the information available so that the user can recover.
 
> Perhaps merging behavious does need to be redesigned, but that's no
> reason _not_ to advocate darcs.  I just consider that to be an
> improvement in the future to what is already a very useful tool.

indeed.  I have become a rather enthusiastic user.  As a friend of mine say "JFW"  (just fooken works).  At least it does at my current level of sophistication.

> If you wait for darcs to be perfect then you'll be waiting too long.  No
> software is ever perfect.  Now is the ideal time to get darcs on the map
> before SVN becomes the industry standard and GNU Arch the distributed
> standard.  Darcs could usurp Arch if only the world knew about it.

here's my suggestion.  Press visibility is transient.  The influx of newbies will peak and then wash away leaving a new core of happy users.  Do some press work.  Watch the influx and when it starts to be half of what you can cope with, stop the press work.  The influx will continue to rise.  You will cope.  After it declines again, start the press work again repeat the cycle and build the user community.

---eric