[darcs-users] unique features + exponential time issue

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On 10/17/07, Alexander Staubo <alex at purefiction.net> wrote:

> There seems to be very little activity regarding stuff that users
> actually see and care about, which is what matters.

Yes and no.  You're in a hurry to see it, I weep for you, but that's
all I can do.  It's called "investing in a better future".  That's what
the refactoring and so on is about.

It's unfortunate that so few people know Haskell, because several
of the concrete issues you discuss seem perfect for the many-eyes
treatment.

> [1] All the fancy talk about patch theory comes to nought when you get
> bogus conflicts, like when *nothing was changed*. Or when you inserted
> code into the same spot as someone else. It happens all the time here.

This is a FAQ, answered in the manual.  This can be a genuine bug, and
since Darcs only has text-manipulation (rather than program semantics
manipulation) patches, it can't tell the difference.  David chose the
conservative route.  You're welcome to disagree with his choice here
(I do, myself), but it follows directly from patch theory.

> [2] Darcs stalls almost consistently on Darwin/Intel when using
> OpenSSH's control master support. This is presumably the reason why
> it's off by default now.

That will have to be fixed by someone working on that platform.  Why not you?

[3] and [4] are issues that the core Darcs developers certainly could in
principle be working on.  I know that repo layout is something that has
been discussed recently, and binary file performance is a long time
issue that the core people don't seem to care about.

But that doesn't mean that nothing is happening, only that what you need
isn't happening yet.