[darcs-users] sad news and steady changes

[Eric Kow]

Hi everybody,

As you have noticed I have recently begun to push patches to the darcs
unstable repository.

I wanted to give you a some background in this change, along with some
sad news.  In the recent months, there has been a little bit of tension
in the darcs community between folks that that would like a more agile
and Haskell-oriented approach on the one hand, and folks that would
prefer a more stable approach with a broader outlook on the community.
Adding to this, we also have the fact looming overhead that David
(starting from January) will be buried in his teaching engagements.  We
have thought this over quite a bit, and have come to some conclusions
about the best way to move forward.

This is where the sad news comes in.  David Roundy will be stepping down
as unstable maintainer and darcs project leader.  I will taking over in
these roles and building a new darcs team (it will certainly take more
than one of us to fill his shoes!).

Thanks very much to David for having given us darcs in the first place,
for the tremendous effort he put into darcs 2 and for putting together
a fun, welcoming darcs community.  David, we're going to miss you, and
I do hope you will be checking in from time to time (and hey finding
a few spare moments to send patches and answer questions).  I hope that
that we will make you proud with the work we will be doing polishing
darcs up, and turning a great revision control system into something
truly world class.  And of course, do let us know when you're ready to
come back and take the lead... :-)

So what comes next?  My first priority as maintainer would be to
complete the work from the darcs sprint.  I will be using the darcs
unstable branch to merge in the remaining changes over the next week.
When the dust has settled, I will transfer the patches over to the
stable branch and probably collapse the two branches again.  The
second priority is to ensure that darcs 2.1.1 is released promptly,
with GHC 6.10.1 support and otherwise no changes.

In the medium term, business will carry on as usual.  I will be starting
a new email thread shortly so that we can decide on the upcoming darcs
roadmap.

Thanks everybody,

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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