I'll give some background rationale behind my objectionable changes, and hopefully we can collectively capture the intent without the objection :-)
On Sat, Apr 11, 2009 at 01:43:05PM +0200, Guillaume Hoffmann wrote: >> Innovative >> Darcs was one of the first implementations of distributed > version control. Unlike younger projects, Darcs' design is > grounded solidly in "patch theory", and continues to > improve as our understanding grows. This has concrete benefits > for users in terms of exceptional flexibility when manipulating > patches. > > First, I'm not sure how long the "innovative" adjective will hold, or > whether it still holds today, because as you say later, it was started I was trying to say "we were doing dVCS before most people realized it was a good idea. Our other ideas are good, but nobody else realizes it yet". > in 2002. Also, I'm always reluctant to mention patch theory to users, > and personally never do it. I prefer to mention "patch freedom". Also > your paragraph sound very insecure : "and continues to improve as our > understanding grows" Sounds like a lot of handwaving here. > >> Easy to use >> [...] Darcs is based on mathematical > theory, but you don't need to understand it to get started! > > I like this item, but the last sentence sounds useless. The point I was trying to convey with those bits is that - we're using mathematics! Which automatically makes us better than the competition, because - they are just doing whatever seems like a good idea at the time. However, - though the internals are very clever, you don't have to be very clever to use Darcs. That third point is similar to people saying "I don't use Haskell because I don't understand monads!" I have the impression that some people avoid Darcs merely because they've *heard* of patch theory, and think that you need a maths degree in order to use Darcs. I wanted to reassure them on that score, rather than just hiding the idea that Darcs has "cleverness" under the hood. As for "improving", while I don't understand patch theory properly, my impression is that the darcs-2 format exists because we (the community) found out that the darcs-1 implementation was "wrong" -- like how dynamic scoping came about because Minsky didn't (initially) understand the lambda calculus. And "we're improving" is meant to lead into camp/darcs-3, i.e. "we can do even better!" > [...] > > Interactive > > Darcs is interactive, and it will ask you questions instead > of making assumptions about what you want to do. This makes it > easy to choose which changes you want to record, or which > updates you want to download. > > Easy to use > > Darcs only requires to learn a simple set of commands and takes care > of the details by itself. I might change "easy to use" to just "simple", although that might have the wrong connotation. It's certainly true that a Darcs command "does more" or is "higher level" than a git or hg command, and that consequently we don't need as many commands. Sometimes I call systems like this "complex, but not complicated" :-) > About the sentence: > > "We think that Darcs has things > to offer that younger rivals like git and hg still can't > match." > > I don't like it: "we think that" sounds unsure. Would "we believe" carry more conviction? I wanted to capture the feeling of the camp video: "we continue to develop darcs/camp because we believe it's better". > Calling git and hg (by the way it's Mercurial) "younger" is > absolutely true, but the fact is that in general they are perceived > as more mature than darcs. While this perception is widespread, I'm not convinced that it's actually true. I wanted to gently challenge that assumption by implying that maybe 1) git/hg get attention because they're "new kids on the block"; and 2) maybe that disparaging Darcs review you read in 2004 doesn't apply anymore. > I think this sentence is not necessary at all. I also wanted to work a mention of our competitors in there somewhere, because it shows that we aren't just stubbornly barreling on down a dead end -- we are aware of those competitors and want to steal their good ideas. It also acts contrariwise to our user manual, which until very recently talked as if our main competitors were CVS and Arch -- which makes us look stuck in the past. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
