Hi Max, I'm very pleased that you're thinking about this stuff, and I'm wondering if you would be interested in working with Guillaume in forming some sort of darcs communications and marketing team. http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/DarcsTeam
In case I've asked you this before, I'm not trying to twist your arm; I just thought maybe now you would be in a better position to do this :-D For what it's worth, one idea I've been kicking around is to publish a "tip of the month" on http://blog.darcs.net, the idea being that we need to increase the general level of darcs expertise in the world and working awareness of what makes darcs especially useful. This is kind of thing we need somebody to declare themselves responsible for, i.e. worrier-in-chief-about-X. Anyway, it seems like the Marketing Machine needs to have two jobs: (A) Getting the word out: what makes darcs exciting to us, why we feel it's genuinely different, what kind of seamlessness we're after. When it works, it works extraordinarily well. (B) Proactive honesty. Simple honesty is not enough. What we need is the kind of honesty, where we actively anticipating all the things we are not telling people and make damned sure we tell them these things up front. People have to know exactly what they're getting into. The newbie confusion thread is an example where I failed in this front. Too much enthusiasm, not enough caution. Quoting Karl Fogel's /Producing Open Source Software/: As for users, one of the worst things a project can do is attract users before the software is ready for them. A reputation for instability or bugginess is very hard to shake, once acquired. Conservativism pays off in the long run; it's always better for the software to be more stable than the user expected than less, and pleasant surprises produce the best kind of word-of-mouth. What I would like a kind of Marketing Machine that can teach people why we are excited about darcs and why we think we should use it, while also being very careful to point out the kinds of situations where darcs is just not the right tool for the job (... yet). Of course, the flip side to this is that we also need to do a better job getting people to recognise "actually, my projects are just the right size for darcs, let's go!". In any case, perhaps it would be useful to have a Marketing Machine that can get people rooting for darcs, even if they don't use it themselves? On Mon, Mar 16, 2009 at 16:16:54 -0400, Max Battcher wrote: > At the moment, I've yet to see anyone post a bad example of a darcs-2 > conflict fight. The conflict issues may not yet be finally and truly > solved, but it is important to repeat that progress has been made (and > is continuing to happen). A lot of people are still being told to avoid > darcs because of the conflicts situation and the community does need to > trumpet the importance of darcs-2 format repositories. At least darcs-2 > is now the default format. Darcs 2 does indeed help people to avoid miserable conflict situations. For example, in issue http://bugs.darcs.net/issue969, the GHC team tried to merge some patches that deleted a directory with patches that modified a directory. In our tests, we converted the GHC repository to darcs 2 and tried the same merge, and this time it went very smoothly. That said, we know of the following theory-related problems in the darcs-2 format: - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1014 Plus the following crashers: - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1211 Two bugs we haven't figured out how to reproduce yet: - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue701 (solved but then re-opened) - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue847 And at least one unknown (and unknown is not a happy state to be in): - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1363 The good news is that at least some of the scarier looking issues have been long fixed, notably - http://bugs.darcs.net/issue1043 I still believe in in the darcs 2 format enough to use it for our own needs (though yes, as Petr says, we have had to recover some branches the hard way when we choked on some dog food -- I'm thinking of issue1211; Petr may be thinking of others), and we do believe that all *new* repositories should be created in the darcs 2 format, and that anybody who is experiencing some sort of conflict misery should also upgrade. The patch-tag.com folks think that they should just push everybody to use darcs-2 from a user experience/simplicity perspective, which I think I can be convinced by. The point is that yes, people *should* use the darcs 2 format and people should understand that the darcs 2 format does resolve a whole lot of conflict pain. But darcs-2 is not perfect. Bad things can happen, rarely, perhaps; but the possibility is still there. The darcs-2 format is still a net improvement over the darcs-1 format in my opinion, but over the long run we will need to work on darcs-3. The good news is that Ian has gotten a head start with his work on camp; I hear proving things with Coq is involved! > Maybe darcs should team up with Mercurial for an soft spoken, big stick > anti-git marketing campaign... Perhaps "Use a DVCS that cares for your > sanity." I'm not sure about going anti-git, but I like the idea of soft spoken. -- Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow> PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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