[darcs-users] How can we help Windows users?

[Eric Kow]

Hi everyone,

Since we were talking about Cabal as a means of working around
Windows's lack of sh, I thought I might forward this advice from Neil.

Sorry for not passing it along earlier.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Neil Mitchell <ndmitchell at gmail.com>
Date: 2008/8/12
Subject: Re: how can we help Windows users?
To: "Eric Y. Kow" <eric.kow at gmail.com>


Hi Eric,

I started to make some notes, I was going to write them up a bit, but
here they are in a very rough form:

* There should be official supported binaries, ideally both .zip form
and with a setup installer. The current darcs has two binaries, cygwin
and non - which is not very helpful. If you have to have two, say
which one someone should want and why. Ideally just have one installer
and have the setup program choose. I just tried the darcs 2.0
binaries, and they failed with a message that they need either wget or
curl - not very helpful to give the user a blind choice not saying how
to obtain either. If you need it, bundle it. If you need something
more, say what you need specifically. I then installed wget, and it
printed out pages and pages of download reports while doing a darcs
get. This makes darcs 2 substantially worse than darcs 1 for me.

* There should be a cabal package on hackage that works, and should
work perfectly with cabal-install. The cabal info should be in the
darcs repo, and I should be recommended to install using Cabal.

Those two are the biggest thing. Make it a smooth transition from
using an official binary release -> compiling a hackage tarball ->
compiling HEAD -> patching.

Feel free to share these comments as you like.

Thanks

Neil



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