On Sun, Apr 12, 2009 at 17:50:32 +0200, Daniel Carrera wrote:
> 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?

Yes, it's good to be clear about these things.  Like you, I'm in it for
the seamlessness.  I want to be able to obliterate, rollback, unrecord,
revert any patch or unrecorded change in my stack without going through
any fuss.  I also want to be able to cherry pick changes without having
to go through any bureaucracy.  I don't want a fancy UI, but a revision
control system that I can trust to let me do these things without
messing something up along the way.  In other words, what I believe to
be true without knowing it for an absolute fact is that this kind of
seamlessness is not really possible without the neat mathematical theory.

See also Ian's Camp video
  http://projects.haskell.org/camp/unique
which I think gets it just right.

> 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).

Mark Stosberg invented the term 'Spontaneous Branch':
  http://wiki.darcs.net/index.html/SpontaneousBranches
Is that what you're talking about?

>> 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.

Yep! I'm not saying that we shouldn't sell darcs, just that we should be
careful to sell darcs for exactly what it is, no more and no less.

You may want to see this previous thread in which I make some
suggestions about what the Marketing Machine could be and also take
a small inventory of the big things that darcs currently gets wrong
  http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2009-March/018460.html
Note especially the issues that Ian found.

So yeah, we should sell darcs and we should sell patch theory, but we
should be absolutely clear on the fact that in its present state darcs
and patch theory have their respective warts.

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9

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