[darcs-users] proposal - darcs gui project?

[Eric Kow]

Hello,

Users: would anybody be interested in darcs having an optional, 
built-in gui?
Developers: would anybody be interested in resurrecting the wxhaskell 
gui code in darcs?

I'm not entirely sure how useful/easy this would be, but it could be a 
fun project.  My proposals are:

1. We create an official darcs-gui branch for work on this sort of 
thing.
    This allows us to make a joyful mess without cluttering up 
darcs-unstable

2. We create a darcs-ui mailing list for discussion on darcs and user 
interfaces.
    Note that this would not just be for the haskell code, but also 
projects like PatchWorks and TortoiseDarcs and maybe even things like 
darcs2rss.  I'm guessing there will be darcs developers who don't care 
for gui stuff and darcs user interface people who don't want to know so 
much about the core devel activity?

3. People already working on 3rd party darcs guis consider also 
volunteering some time hacking on the built-in gui.
    Who knows?  Maybe a tighter integration might be useful, maybe not.  
It'd also be a chance to learn or to improve your haskell.  I'll bet 
your 3rd party guis and the built-in one will coexist happily -- more 
than one way to solve a problem, different problems being solved (?), 
and all that.

Implementation ideas:

4. To reduce the use of ifdefs in the code, we move all the gui code 
into their own files (say in a gui subdir).  Eventually, if darcs 
becomes a library, we could just split this off into a standalone 
project.

5. The GUI code unilaterally adopts a namespace :-), say Darcs.GUI

6. We look into Blobs as a graphical tool for visualising patch 
dependencies

Any takers? Anybody interested in helping out?

-- 
Eric Kow                     http://www.loria.fr/~kow
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9         Merci de corriger mon français.