Overview
After the release of darcs 2.0 the user community became unsure of the future of darcs development. We have ambitious plans for darcs and we see that we must do a better job of communicating these ambitions.
An important meta goal is to lower the barrier to entry for new darcs developers and casual contributors. To help achieve this we are excited about improving source level comments including adding Haddock style documentation. Another goal is based on the canaries below. We learned from the GHC team's evaluation that darcs2 has too many performance regressions and these need to be corrected ASAP.
How can I help?
You can help by looking at our release goals below. Currently we need people to read through the source code and ask us questions, preferably on the darcs-users mailing list. This will help us focus our documentation efforts. You can also help by simply building a version of darcs for profiling and sending us your profiling results and a reproducible benchmark.
darcs 2.2.0 (2009-01)
Issues targeted for this release: Target 2.2
- Cabal support
- libdarcs 0.0.1
- clarify roadmap
- identify more modules where documentation would benefit newcomers the most (newcomers, your input is needed! Also, haddocking the code as you discover it is a great way to double your contribution.)
- code safety
- performance
build performance regression script - done! see StandardDarcsBenchmarks
- improved windows support
- bugs
darcs 2.3.0 (2009-07)
Issues targeted for this release: Target 2.3
- documentation
haddock repository manipulation (PetrRockai)
- roadmap
- identify 10 more modules to be fully haddocked and made readable
- identify top 10 modules to unit test
Haskell-only read-only libdarcs issue1149
darcs transplant issue938
sort out XML and encodings issue issue33
HashedIO optimisation (PetrRockai)
darcs 2.4.0 (2010-01)
- Haskell-only libdarcs with writing
improved conflict marking issue833
- complete and polish tortoise-darcs
- continue adding haddock comments
- continue adding unit tests
future darcs
- seamless integration with git, svn, etc
Canaries
Canaries are projects/people which can give us an indicator on how well darcs is doing, that is, how useful darcs is wrt the pain from the various performance issues and bugs. They provide us with some combination of thoughtful, articulate, vocal, demanding and possessor-of-large-repositories.
- the darcs team (how does that dog food taste? lovely, thanks, now that we have darcs 2)
John Goerzen (Haskell heretic
switched to Mercurial, wrote some detailed comparisons) - the GHC team (switched to git)
the Tahoe team (apparently much happier with darcs 2) -- Well I, Zooko, am a member of the Tahoe team (http://allmydata.org), and I'm pretty happy with darcs-2, but my partners are not entirely happy with it. I would be happy to relay their concerns (or ask them to do so) now that this page and other developments make it appear as though there is an active and organized community effort which could usefully listen to those concerns!
- Linus... (one day)
Feel free to add yourself to the canary list, especially if you are switcher in one direction or the other.