[darcs-users] pure haskell darcs

[S. Alexander Jacobson]

It seems like people have a lot of build problems 
on this list and that darcs doesn't work at all on 
windows right now.  This both unfortunate and 
unncessary.

Looking at the source, I imagine the problems come 
from the vaguaries of getting Haskell to talk to C 
libraries on multiple platforms.  I wonder how 
hard it would be to get rid of the C code and make 
darcs much more reliably buildable and portable.

I don't know the source well at all but from my 
brief skim it looks like the critical bits are 
hscurl and zlib_helper.

Gzip is now available in Haskell in MissingH.

I am not sure how much of libcurl's functionality 
darcs uses, but it seems like the basic job of 
being an HTTP client is handled by 
http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/warrickg/haskell/http/

Can we get rid of the C code and dramatically 
simplifiy building darcs?

-Alex-

______________________________________________________________
S. Alexander Jacobson tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com