[darcs-users] fwd: volunteers with always-on boxes sought for automated testing

[Jason Dagit]

On Tue, Mar 4, 2008 at 4:34 PM, David Roundy <droundy at darcs.net> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 05, 2008 at 09:03:23AM +0900, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
>  > If you're unwilling to support the test scripts on some platform,
>  > Possibily you should go all the way and declare that Darcs is not
>  > supported at all on that platform, even if it happens to work.
>
>  No, that's ridiculous.  Darcs is supported on any platform on which users
>  compile it and help us fix errors by reporting them.  Removing the human
>  element from darcs' development process is not a useful plan.  Nor is
>  reducing the human element to droundy a useful plan.  Platforms on which
>  noone cares to try out darcs are not platforms on which I care to port
>  darcs.

Another way to think about this (one that I think encompasses both
your view points) is that in an open source project such as darcs, the
"support" comes from volunteers.  David is suggesting we need more
volunteers (not just buildbots) to support those platforms.  Stephen
is suggesting that we allow darcs to work on those platforms, but is
not unofficially supported.  Meaning, it will likely work, but there
may be things that break for which we don't (currently) have a
volunteer for.  Both of you are really getting at a similar point.  We
really could use more people who know about integrating software with
other software, such as various operating systems to step forward and
help support things.

Perhaps it's time to create a small table listing which platforms
darcs has been reported to work on and the level of "support" we have
for those platforms.  Since darcs meets my needs on the platforms I
use and I too have darcs bugs/features that I'm more useful (or just
more interested in) working on, I doubt I'll create such a table, but
I would encourage someone to do so and place it on the darcs wiki.
Maybe seeing that someone's favorite platform is lacking a high level
of support will inspire him/her to step forward.

This reminds me of binary patches.  At some point, someone really
needs to implement a binary diff but since David and many of the other
regular darcs devs don't need this, it's never been "supported".

I think it is unfortunate that many people who are open source
contributors and enjoy using darcs never send in a patch to improve
darcs.  I've spoken to many people on freenode that use the excuse
they don't know Haskell.  Well, I assure you, none of the darcs devs
were born knowing Haskell :)  But more importantly, not all of the
useful ways of helping involve knowing Haskell.  Haskell only happens
to be the language that most of darcs is implemented in.  The
repository also contains C, Perl, LaTeX, Bash and English.  If you
know any of those languages, there is a good chance there is some
aspect of darcs that could use a few hours of volunteer work to
improve.

There are also tools that could be written to help support project
management based around darcs repositories.  Such as good patch
tracking tools for mailing lists.  There have been a few debates on
darcs-devel and darcs-user lists about how such tools should work or
whether they should be used by darcs maintainers, but picking any of
the option permutations would ultimately help darcs even if darcs HQ
didn't adopt them, simply by making darcs nicer for users who do adopt
them.

I guess my whole point with this is simply, darcs has limited
volunteer developer resources but you can help mitigate that
restriction by contributing a few hours here and there.  And "Thank
you!" to anyone who has done this.

Thanks,
Jason