Eric Kow wrote:
I'll just remark that trying to market darcs is a bit of minefield. It's tremendously easy to say something that gives people the wrong idea. We talk about smart, people think complicated; we talk about precision, they think semantics. Stephen is doing us a great service by pointing out where some of the landmines are. We would do very well to take his advice into grave consideration.
Yes indeed. Thanks Stephen!
But I think we can do it! At the very least, I think we can do a better job making it clear to the world why we work on darcs, what makes it different. Maybe it shouldn't be about why darcs is better, or why you should use it, but why we need to keep working on it and what having a working theory of patches can do for you.
Well... other SCMs are more popular. If they are all the same, it is reasonable to pick the more popular one. You pick the less popular one if there is something special about it compared to the others. What are darcs' strengths?
This isn't just about marketing, it's also for us. Ask yourself, why do *you* use darcs? Why are you here and not in a different list? There must be something that you find compelling about it that you don't get elsewhere. Just for yourself, you'd want to find out what that is. Is it the community? The neat mathematical theory?
For me, a big thing I like about darcs is that it is very easy to edit and delete patches. I regularly silly mistakes in my code and I love that I can 'darcs amend', 'darcs undo' and 'darcs obliterate'. I tried using Monotone for a while, and for all the great things about monotone, I ended up going back to darcs because it's easier to erase a mistake. Another thing I like is that if I'm working on feature X and my boss tells me that he wants feature Y tomorrow, I can accommodate without even making a branch (feature Y being just a small change).
Anyway. Careless marketing can be counterproductive, which is why I tend to be more interested in removing uncertainty ... than in selling darcs.
Keep in mind that selling darcs also brings developers, bug reports and bug fixes. So there is merit in selling.
Daniel. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
