[darcs-users] some notes on patchwork and Darcs UI

[Wolfgang Jeltsch]

Am Dienstag, 21. Juli 2009 20:00 schrieb Jason Dagit:
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2009 at 10:48 AM, Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> wrote:
> > The analysis of the darcs source code was very difficult for us because
> > there are far too less comments - even on essential types. Many
> > identifiers do not have meaningful names. Potential Darcs developers who
> > are not forced to deal with it by a student project could be seriously
> > discouraged by your sources.
>
> Thanks for the constructive criticism.  I agree with you 100%.  The
> situation has been improving over time, but very slowly.  My thesis,
> http://blog.codersbase.com/2009/03/25/type-correct-changes-a-safe-approach-to-version-control-implementation/
>
> should help some with hard to understand types.

Actually, the above comments were written by my students, not me. :-)

> If you or your students have notes you could contribute in the form of
> source level documentation or suggestions to rename identifiers that would
> also be valuable and appreciated.

I have to admit that I don’t know the Patchwork code very well. Regarding 
identifiers, I only remember the students showing me a darcs code snippet 
where there were two identifiers “files” and “filez”. Of course, these 
identifiers don’t make it obvious what the difference between their values 
is.

The student project has finished a couple of months ago, and I don’t have the 
time to further dig into these issues. So, alas, you cannot expect much help 
from our side at the moment. You can ask me questions at any time, but it’s 
not clear whether I’ll be able to answer them. However, there following 
should be helpful:

    a) the documentation on the Patchwork Development Wiki
            <http://trac.haskell.org/patchwork/>

    b) the source code of Patchwork, including all its comments
            <http://code.haskell.org/patchwork/main/>

Best wishes,
Wolfgang