[darcs-users] managing change

[zooko]

On Feb 7, 2009, at 17:46 PM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Twisted is a different case, though, being a commercial product  
> with programmers paid to work on it.

I don't think that's quite the case -- there is a company that  
employs several of the primary Twisted hackers, but I don't think  
they get paid to work on Twisted during work hours.  There are other  
related projects that they do work on during work hours: the Divmod  
projects.

On the other hand Twisted recently (after the transition we're  
discussing) started soliciting donations from companies that use  
Twisted and I think they paid one programmer a few times to work on  
it.  I'm not sure of the details.

> it's not clear to me what makes Haskell suited to testing when the  
> whole point is compile-time rigor.

People tend to think of compile-time checking and testing as  
alternatives, but that's crazy -- they're complements.  If you have a  
really good type-checking system and a purely functional language  
then you can rule out vast swathes of the space of possible  
influences on the behavior of the code under test.  This doesn't  
eliminate the need for testing (if it did it would be a proof of  
correctness), but it does make it much easier to figure out what  
inputs you need to test, because the space of inputs that can  
possibly have any effect at runtime is so much smaller.

Hm, this is interesting, googling for "Haskell unit testing" yields a  
tutorial by Leif Frenzel, the author of the Eclipse Darcs plugin:

http://cohatoe.blogspot.com/2007/04/unit-testing-in-haskell.html

And what's this?  It turns out that rumors of the Eclipse Darcs  
plugin's death have been greatly exaggerated!  In an earlier message,  
Max Battcher wrote:

On Jan 24, 2009, at 22:42 PM, Max Battcher wrote:
> «Another drawback is the complete lack of alternative user  
> interfaces. There is no GUI, no TortoiseSVN-like Explorer  
> integration on Windows and no Eclipse support either, as far as I  
> know.»
...
> Also, when was the last time EclipseDarcs was updated?  Is it still  
> alive?  Hmm, the domain (eclipsedarcs.org) appears to have lapsed  
> and the SourceForge project shows no major activity in 2 years.   
> Ouch. (That might be a project worth reviving by somebody, but I  
> personally don't use Eclipse so I have no idea if anyone actually  
> cares.)

And yet I now see:

http://cohatoe.blogspot.com/2008/03/eclipsedarcs-041-available.html

Oh, that is a small update and it is a year ago.  Hm.  I'll write to  
Leif Frenzel to ask him what's the status of the Eclipse Darcs Plugin.

Regards,

Zooko
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