[darcs-users] darcs.net home page proposal

[Guillaume Hoffmann]

Hello,

This is my first message on the list. I'm a darcs user since more than
1 year, and recently I have been contemplating using other DVCS
software for my work. So, I tried Mercurial, Git and Bazaar, and in
the process, I realised that darcs had obvious advantages that I had
never been aware of.

So I gave a look at http://darcs.net and I thought the message
delivererd could be clearer, and more focused on the user side than on
the theoretical side. I have made a mockup of a new version of this
page, I would like to know what you all think:
http://progg.free.fr/doc/

The changes:
* the text is slightly shorter
* changed "smart" to "simple" (to me , the "smart" part is already
explained in "interactive")
* no mention to patch theory on the main page, this is moved to that
page : http://progg.free.fr/doc/patch.html . My rationale: people
don't care, and first of all they don't understand. Even I, as a darcs
user, only understood what was cherry picking when I saw that the
other DVCS systems didn't have it.
* the "distributed" paragraph is now thought for CVS / SVN users, and
gives practical advantages of DVCS over centralised ones. The current
paragraph on darcs.net was never clear to me.
* addition of the page http://progg.free.fr/doc/patch.html that really
shows why darcs is superior in usability . OK the mockups are ugly,
because I don't know how to make animations, but they give the idea.
The "Branching and Merging" one is very important to me, because this
is what disappointed me in the other systems (they make you create a
merge patch). There is at last a mention and a link to patch theory
explanation.

Darcs' message is not clearly heard currently. The mockup here is
essentially a proposal on the content of message than on it's form.
Maybe also the visual shape of http://darcs.net can be improved. For
instance http://xmonad.org has a nice new homepage.

What do you think ?

Guillaume