[darcs-users] new darcs maintainer: Guillaume Hoffmann

[Guillaume Hoffmann]

Hi David,

> At the moment I don't really know what to expect from Darcs.  The Darcs
> development team is passionate and highly competent but very small.  I also
> don't know what the direction will be.  What are the major improvements
> you'd all like to work on?

Right now, I'm not working on any major improvement but rather seeing
what should go into the next release, which I'd like to do next
February. It will probably not have any new killer feature and will be
mostly code improvements with some visible improvements (hopefully
we'll solve the "couldn't fetch" bugs this time!). Also it is good to
regularly keep up with new GHC releases.

In parallel I'd like to have students work on projects. I put online
the following Projects page: http://darcs.net/Projects , which would
be for any kind of student projects, not only GSoC.

> From the top of my head the perceived shortcomings of previous Git users are

> - switching branches is not possible within the same directory [...]

+1

See http://bugs.darcs.net/issue555 for an old discussion about this
and a shell script that "implements" this feature, while we wait for
Ganesh's stash implementation :)

> - it's not as easy to refer to a specific state of the repository using a
> hash

I'd like to see progress on this issue, within the possibilities of
darcs' current repo format.

See http://bugs.darcs.net/issue992 and http://darcs.net/Ideas/ShortSecureId

Or maybe can we use darcsden somehow to store more information about
repositories?

> - when merging conflicts it's difficult to understand which part of the
> marked conflict belongs to which patch

See http://bugs.darcs.net/issue833

Ganesh did some work on this:

http://hub.darcs.net/ganesh/darcs-conflict-marking

I remember Ganesh said it was inefficient, but anyway I wonder if we
can have this into 2.12 ?

> - I'd like to amend-record a patch that other patches depend on (without
> having to suspend, amend-record, unsuspend)

I wonder if we can have such detection of cases where rebasing can be
automatic? It would definitely be great to have!

thanks for the feedback David!

Guillaume