[darcs-users] Some newbie questions

[Andrew Pimlott]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 04:26:57PM +0100, Simon Liu wrote:
> 1. For the ignore and binary config lists, what is the format of the
> regular expression?

"POSIX extended".  If you have egrep on your system, check the man page.
Otherwise, you should be able to search for it.

> 4. Are there many contributors to the project who are familiar with
> the patch theory and the code base in general?  I hope the project
> succeeds - I use CVS and SVN locally.  Recently my ISP lost broadband
> connectivity for two days.  If my CVS and SVN servers were hosted
> remotely, it would been very frustrating.   But it would also be
> terrible if David lost interest in darcs :-( , and there weren't any
> Haskell proficient coders out there to carry on all the good work.

Allow me to hazzard an answer, which may presume too much about others'
understanding of darcs.  Plenty of people can and do understand the
darcs code.  There are enough Haskell coders around, and it seems that
most of them will be using darcs soon enough, so I bet someone would
pick it up.

However, I don't think anyone but David really understands the patch
theory.  IMO one of the best things that could happen for darcs would be
for some CS or math person to write a paper about the patch theory.
(David could do it, of course, but he seems busy and it wouldn't help
his physics career!)  I bet you'd then see lots of wicked smart people
working on the difficult unresolved problems that have been discussed on
this list.

Andrew