Hi, it seems that we have reached a point in darcs development where it would make a lot of sense to start improving our general codebase and the libdarcs interface.
Also, there are some rewrites in store for parts of darcs functionality (e.g. annotate) and a port to hashed-storage 0.6 (which itself is a work in progress). We have discussed how to manage these kinds of changes review- and merge- wise, and our current conclusion is that it would likely be best to create a separate branch. I'm proposing for the branch to live on http://darcs.net/adventure. The current review team should stay responsible for this branch, in addition to mainline (http://darcs.net). The main differences in the process for the adventure branch would be: - for mainline, we are trying hard to keep everything fully functional and nearly-releasable... this requirement would not hold for adventure, making it possible to merge work in progress that temporarily breaks darcs - the kind of review we do on mainline is quite detailed -- on the adventure branch, we would probably drop line-to-line reviews and instead favour higher-level, "design" view The changes landing in adventure are likely to be very invasive. Therefore, we do not intend to ever merge adventure and the current mainline. Instead, applicable fixes that are merged into mainline should be also done on adventure. At some point, when adventure is no longer very adventurous and we are satisfied with its shape, we will swap it in for mainline. I hope that this is going to be a one-off venture: one of the main goals of the adventure branch will be to get the darcs codebase into a state where further refactorings and far-reaching changes will be manageable within mainline. The timeline is not completely clear yet, I have to finish off a couple of items before branching. Since the adventure branch will (at least initially) remove old-fashioned support, I am currently working on darcs-benchmark support for darcs 1, so we can meaningfully compare darcs 1 and darcs 2 performance. We should close the hashed/OF performance gaps that still exist (this will be another goal of the adventure branch). I may have missed important bits in this message (unintentionally)... However, Ganesh and Eric will be hopefully able to fill in the blanks, if that was the case. Yours, Petr. PS: I intend to have sort of a darcs hacking drive from mid-September till about mid-January. This partially motivates the adventure branch. Hopefully, we'll all like the results. _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
