[darcs-users] more darcs marketing

[Eric Kow]

On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 16:56:28 +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
>> There is a way out of this problem.  And that's to focus on how Darcs
>> makes sane programming easier by checking what can be checked and
>> doing what can be done in typical cases, rather than focusing on a
>> spurious notion of correctness in edge cases.
>
> I was hoping that we would some example to justify the claim that the  
> theory of patches is somehow better than 3-way merge.

I'll just remark that trying to market darcs is a bit of minefield.
It's tremendously easy to say something that gives people the wrong
idea.  We talk about smart, people think complicated; we talk
about precision, they think semantics.  Stephen is doing us a great
service by pointing out where some of the landmines are.  We would do
very well to take his advice into grave consideration.

But I think we can do it!  At the very least, I think we can do a better
job making it clear to the world why we work on darcs, what makes it
different.  Maybe it shouldn't be about why darcs is better, or why you
should use it, but why we need to keep working on it and what having a
working theory of patches can do for you.

Anyway.  Careless marketing can be counterproductive, which is why I
tend to be more interested in removing uncertainty -- pinning down
things like merging being quadratic in the absence of conflicts, getting
more data on the repository sizes that darcs handles well, having more
cleanly documented patch theory -- than in selling darcs.

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