[darcs-users] Theory of Patches

[Daniel Carrera]

Eric Kow wrote:
> Being a work in progress, camp should probably be left to evolve on its
> own.  They need access to lots of fancier tools, in particular, LaTeX
> for math typesetting and Coq for proving things (with an interesting use
> of what seems to be Literate Coq).  It doesn't stop us from grabbing
> bits and pieces from them as time goes on, for example, the more stable
> parts of its terminology.

Ok. We can just grab bits and pieces. But I'd hope that the Darcs site 
become updated enough that there's no need to point people to Camp to 
learn about the theory of patches.

> The wiki and wikibook could probably be merged (with some minor
> licensing and technical hurdles to overcome).

Sounds good.


> Second: in the community we're already making several technological
> transitions (from autoconf/make to cabal, from moinmoin to gitit, from
> LaTeX to RST).  We're really not in a position to deal with yet another
> leap.  At this stage, we need to rest a bit, by focusing on darcs
> hacking and finishing what transitions we've started.  By the way, the
> current demo of gitit may not be so good.  Try
> http://gitit.johnmacfarlane.net/ instead.

At least I can say that Gitit looks much better than MoinMoin. I was 
concerned that Gitit would look like MoinMoin. But Gitit looks nice. It 
feels... cleaner... I can't put it into words.


> I don't mean to dampen your enthusiasm, but can we set the CMS
> discussion aside for now and focus on the documentation itself?

At least Gitit has a side bar and it looks nicer than Moin. If we can 
just edit the side bar, I'll be happy. The 'Site' box is a good place 
for navigation. Can we edit the Site box?


> I realise this leads to crappy navigation, but I'll consciously accept
> that cost to avoid paying the other costs.

At least Gitit has a side bar! If we can edit that, I'll consider it a 
good compromise. A small change that fixes most of the navigation.


> So speaking of moving on: what is the first thing you would tackle?
> Perhaps the first step is for you to survey the documentation we have?

I could copy/migrate/organize the current content to Gitit. I enjoy 
organizing stuff, and it gives me an opportunity to survey the current 
documentation like you suggested. And if I don't contribute anything 
else, at least I helped with the Gitit migration.

Cheers,
Daniel.