[darcs-users] darcsweb future

Alberto Bertogli albertito at blitiri.com.ar
Sun Mar 28 20:53:08 UTC 2010


On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 10:09:32AM -0700, Simon Michael wrote:
> Alberto, thanks for your reply. I've taken the liberty of cc'ing the  

You're welcome.


> darcs list to spread awareness, I hope you don't mind.

I don't!


> On Mar 28, 2010, at 9:17 AM, Alberto Bertogli wrote:
>> On Sun, Mar 28, 2010 at 09:04:05AM -0700, Simon Michael wrote:
>> I have moved to git for all my projects a long time ago, but I still  
>> maintain
>> darcsweb, and plan to keep doing so.
>>
>> Since it's been very stable, maintaining it takes up very little of my 
>> time
>> and I think it's a way of contributing back to darcs, which was very  
>> useful to
>> me.
>>
>> Plus, I don't see many alternatives that can take darcsweb's place  
>> (there are
>> other browsers, but much heavier to install and run than darcsweb,  
>> like the
>> trac integration), so I think it makes sense to keep fixing bugs and  
>> merging
>> the occasional patch or working on the occasional feature request.
>
> I agree with you. My only reservation (and the reason I pinged you) is  
> that something written in haskell might get more participation from the 
> darcs hackers and might integrate better with other tools.

Maybe. But that's not something I can help with, and to be honest I
don't think that's healthy either.

If you want to have a good set of support tools for darcs, I don't think
intentionally focusing on one language makes much sense.

I know that, fortunately, that's not the case. Darcs has a lot of Haskell
programmers in its user (and obviously developer) base, but also has very good
support for non-Haskell tools.

I've been using darcs' XML output for darcsweb (and a couple of other minor
tools) over time and it's been great. So I never felt that there was a lack of
integration with darcs by not using haskell, at least not for the things I
wrote.

I think things like the darcs library are good, but it's also good to have
alternatives (like the XML output) for those who prefer not to write
darcs-related tools in Haskell.


> For example darcsden has a simple repo browser 
> (http://darcsden.com/alex/darcs/changes), the potential for deep darcs 
> integration using libdarcs, and I believe with some new skin templates 
> could look quite similar to darcsweb. It brings other baggage of course, 
> but perhaps the repo browser could be factored out.

It looks nice. I am glad there are more people working on darcs tools and web
interfaces. It's a good thing to have alternatives where to choose from.


> On the other hand, darcsweb is battle tested, has an effective caching  
> system, is very easy to deploy, and gives very good tracebacks when it  
> goes wrong. :)

Thanks! The good tracebacks you have Python to thank for, tho.


> On the third hand, I would like a good just-works repo browser to be  
> built in or shipped with darcs. Like eg mercurial and fossil do. I'd be 
> happy with darcsweb, but perhaps haskell would be more ideal.

That's up to the darcs developers to decide. It used to be the case that there
was a darcs.cgi shipped with the source, but was unmaintained and not very
featureful IIRC.

I don't think it's a necessity that darcs ships with a repo browser, as long
as they exist, are known, and are easy to install.


>>> I still use it frequently. Thanks for making it.
>>
>> Glad to see it's useful. You're welcome!
>>
>> BTW, if you have patches that you think make sense to include in  
>> darcsweb,
>> don't hesitate to send them!
>
> Ok, I just sent two (hide Ignore-this in log view, allow viewing more  
> than 50 patches).

Thanks. I'll take a look at them and let you know.


>> Also, if you have any feature requests, I'd be glad to hear about  
>> them.
>
>
> Here are two:
>
> 1. in tree view, show recorded files and directories only (we discussed 
> this before)

I vaguely remember that the problem with this was that it wasn't easy to
determine which files were under darcs' wing and which ones weren't.

I still don't see a solution that does not involve a darcs invocation, but
maybe that can be made optional.

Do you know of any alternatives?


> 2. an email address at 
> http://blitiri.com.ar/p/darcsweb/repos/darcsweb/_darcs/author  for darcs 
> send

Done!

Thanks a lot,
		Alberto



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