[darcs-users] Welcome DARCS 2 and DARCS browser

Santiago Estrada Rubio estrasan at hotmail.com
Mon Apr 21 23:08:58 UTC 2008


(My apologies for my English: Although I can read English is difficult for
me to write). 

During the past months I have studied the various version control systems,
and in the end, I decided to use DARCS because I think it follows the
correct path through the theory of patches.

So, as a new user, I welcome DARCS 2, and appreciate the tremendous effort
made by David Roundey and all contributors. After that effort, I understand
that David Roundy is tired and seek more contributors in his announcement of
version 2:

"...It means that if darcs is to continue to improve, we need new
contributors..."
 
I would love to be able to contribute to the development of DARCS kernel,
but I'm not a Haskell programmer (Haskell is a nice language but... perhaps
there are few DARCS contributors because there are few Haskell programmers).


I, myself, work in the Microsoft.Net framework and therefore I can only
contribute in the development of a tool.

What tool?

Programmers are comfortable with the command shell, but I work with HTML Web
designers... after a few unsuccessful attempts to use de command shell, I
taught them to use TortoiseDARCS for windows.

During two months, Web Designers have been using TortoiseDARCS and I must
say that it works relatively well with DARCS 1 repositories (now
old-fashioned), but it doesn't recognize hashed and  DARCS 2 experimental
repositories (TortoiseDarcs marks them as repositories, but commands fail).
Apart from that, TortoiseDARCS is too oriented to SVN and does not take the
main characteristics of DARCS, and it seems that the development of
TortoiseDARCS stands in its pilot phase for two years.

In short: it would be great to have a good visual browser for web designers,
translators, etc.. (a Visual Studio and Web Expression plugin would be great
too...).

Therefore I would like to contribute developing a genuine DARCS browser for
Windows (and Linux too, through the Mono Framework).

But I find a first difficulty to do so: as far as I know, DARCS has no API.
Well, that is not an insurmountable difficulty: commands are DARCS API and
we can start a cmd.exe process for each operation reading command answers
from standardOutput or StandardError (and writing to StandardInput, if
necessary). But there appears the next challenge: except for commands that
have xml output, we need to parse the command output free text... well, this
is complicated but neither is insurmountable.

In relation to the above, I have three questions: 

1. Does anyone know if there is already a similar development project?
2. Does anyone know a better method to develop a DARCS Explorer? (I thought
to directly read the repository, but it would be like partially
reprogramming DARCS kernel).
3. Does anyone know if there are Schemas, DTDs or similar for xml-output
options?
4. Does anyone know if there is a list for "tools developers"?

Thanks

Santiago Estrada



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