[darcs-users] new darcs maintainer: Guillaume Hoffmann

[Eric Kow]

Hello Darcs users!

So last month I had a chance to reunite with the active members of the
Darcs team (Ganesh and Guillaume) at the Paris hacking sprint.  It was
a very nice time and I hope to see everyone again soon. During the
sprint (in between hack sessions), we also spent some time thinking
about the general future of Darcs, what sorts of directions we could
go in and how we can go about getting there. For example, what if we
thought a little outside the version control box? Could Darcs find a
niche for for making patch reordering work for other version control
systems? Possibly. It's worth exploring.

It's a different world out there now (but ever changing) than seven
years ago. In particular I think we have done an absolutely *splendid*
job adhering to the old Haskell slogan “avoid success at all costs!”
;-).  On the one hand the smaller community makes it harder to find
help and get effort directed at things. On the other hand, it's also a
blessing of sorts. With a little less juggling on our hands, we can
now direct more attention to the core work of getting Darcs right
(that's why we're pretty excited to see Pijul; this sort of work is
very helpful to us).

We still love Darcs; we still think it has something unique to offer
to the world and we still think it's interesting enough to work on.
There is a lot of work to do: hammering out of the core theory,
cleaning up of the code base, improving the basic engineering, the UI,
the ecosystem… In the meantime, I am glad to have been able to spend
some more time with Darcs folks. I get a lot of happiness out seeing
that people are still interested in working on Darcs and taking us
further along.

That said, as much as I may love Darcs personally, I also recognise
that for the past three years and perhaps many more I have not been in
a place where I knew how to fit free/open source software hacking into
my life. In fact, I hadn't been doing any such fitting at all, having
wandered off except for manning the spam filter, writing the odd HCAR
report. I've even — gasp! — gotten much much better at using Git.

This is where Guillaume come in. Luckily for Darcs, some active
members of the team have been merrily going about the business of not
just hacking on Darcs, but running summer of code projects, recruiting
new developers, making links with the academic world. So how about we
make it official? How about we swap Guillaume in as the new face of
Darcs since he's already been effectively doing the job anyway?

I hope I didn't overdo the “you'll be fine!” downplaying when I was in
Paris.  The role is a bit more than a nominal one and does come with
some responsibility. But I've seen Guillaume at work, seen the energy
he's putting into organising things, into chasing up on people, seen
the way he runs a sprint. I think he'll be more than fine.

So without further ado… I'd like to say, welcome to our new
maintainer, Guillaume Hoffmann!

Eric

PS: Good luck! No really, you will just be fine! :-)

PPS Unfortunately, I'm not likely to make it to Seville for the next
one <http://darcs.net/Sprints/2016-01> but hope you have a great time,
and that I can see you in the future.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://erickow.com>