[darcs-users] poll: how can we help you contribute to darcs?

[Ben Franksen]

Brandon S. Allbery KF8NH wrote:
> On 2008 Aug 3, at 19:16, Ben Franksen wrote:
>> The naive way to emulate your split feature would be to create a
>> branch
>> where you delete all the stuff you don't want and then maybe move the
>> subproject to a new directory (nearer the top-level). This doesn't
>> work,
>> however, at least not in practice. This is because deletion of a file
>> conflicts with a change to the same file which leads to a huge
>> amount of
>> conflicts each time you pull from the old combined repo. And the
>> reason you
>> get these conflicts is that in darcs a file always gets emptied before
>> deletion, and this is because changing a file depends on its
>> existence in
>> the first place. I proposed to change this and allow changes to
>> non-existing files, so called 'ghosts'. This has a number of
>> interesting
>> consequences, among them that you could delete as many files as you
>> want
>> and will never again get a conflict with changes to those files
>> (that is,
>> unless you explicitly 'resurrect' the ghost).
>>
>> Unfortunately few people (and none of the core-developers) seemed to
>> be
>> interested :( The small thread that developed on the darcs-users list
>> should still be available in the archives if you are interested in the
>> details.
> 
> I would suggest that they'd be more interested if you provided code;
> if they have no need for your proposal they're unlikely to devote time
> to coding it.

You are suggesting that I am expecting others to devote time to code
proposals of mine. I don't know where you get this idea. I am used to
discuss the merits of a new feature, especially one so far-reaching, before
starting to unilaterally throw code at a project. Your own style of
collaboration might be different, though.

Anyway, I would suggest that you add something of interest rather than
patronizing people with dubious 'suggestions'.

Cheers
Ben