[darcs-users] maintenance file for bugs

[Dmitry Kurochkin]

On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Eric Kow <kowey at darcs.net> wrote:
> On Sun, Mar 15, 2009 at 16:33:35 +0100, Dmitry Kurochkin wrote:
>> Besides POST, HTTP is used to fetch maintenance info (or how is it
>> called?) from darcs.net in case of bug. We can not use curl here
>> because it uses bug itself. I never understood why darcs does this.
>> IMHO there is little use in this, but it can introduce delays (or bug
>> inside bug :)) if network connection is slow or mis-configured or
>> something goes wrong in haskell-http. I would vote for removing it.
>
> Interesting thought.
>
> Here's the URL for the maintenance file:
>  http://www.darcs.net/maintenance
>
> And the current contents:
>
> 2.2.0rc1
> "This is a release candidate version of darcs.\nYou can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
> 2.2.0pre
> "This is a prerelease version of darcs.\nYou can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
> pre
> "This is an old prerelease version of darcs.\nPlease do not report this to bugs at darcs.net"
> rc
> "This is an old release-candidate version of darcs.\nPlease do not report this to bugs at darcs.net"
> .
> "You can check to see if this bug is already known at http://bugs.darcs.net/\nIf it is not, please report this to bugs at darcs.net\nIf possible include the output of 'darcs --exact-version'."
>
> As I understand in, before we introduced this mechanism, darcs would
> systematically tell you to report bugs to bugs at darcs.net.  I guess somewhere
> along the way, we must have gotten fed up with reports based on older
> pre-releases and release candidates, so we introduced a small phone-home
> feature that darcs can use to see if users should report the error or not.
> This mechanism is pretty flexible.  We could, for example, check for a
> particular version and tell the user the workaround for a particular
> bug affecting just that version.
>
> But Dmitry is also right that this mechanism has problems of its own,
> particularly the circular imports.

I can see what benefits this potentially gives, but most of other
projects are happy without phone-home feature. Just print a warning if
the version is not an official release. And a big note on bugtracker
saying how to properly submit bugs.

Besides in it's current state it can behave poorly, e.g. it does not
support proxy - and darcs is likely to hang until network connection
timeout in such case.

Regards,
  Dmitry

>
> --
> Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
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