[darcs-users] GHC and Darcs

[Reinier Lamers]

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Op 31-jul-2008, om 20:06 heeft Eric Y. Kow het volgende geschreven:

>> On the other hand, Ian has also contributed a grand total of one line
>> of code to darcs since he started work on ghc, so this isn't a strong
>> case that ghc is contributing to darcs.
>
> Hey! Let's bounce off this note and Max's "energy" questions, to work
> out how we can do a better job of attracting developers and keeping  
> them.
>
> I think we need to target Haskellers.  Maybe a good informal (if  
> cheesy)
> poll to take on the Haskell Café is to have them complete this  
> sentence:
>
>   I would contribute to darcs if only...
I haven't seen the question yet on haskell-cafe, but I have an answer  
so I'm giving it here.

I've tried to contribute to darcs a bit a few months ago, because I'm  
a darcs user, I had some time on my hands and I'd noticed that darcs  
was a bit underpowered. But I have to say that I was disappointed by  
what I could do. If I wanted to fix something, I'd have to dig  
through many many source files only to find out that I was looking in  
the wrong place.

It seems that not just Haskell, but also darcs itself has quite a  
steep learning curve. The repository format is undocumented. There is  
no comprehensive guide to patch theory. The source code is mostly  
uncommented (having the user documentation interleaved with the  
source code is not a replacement for technical comments about the  
behavior of a function).

So I think I would contribute (more) to darcs if only there were more  
technical documentation.

Regards,
Reinier
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