[darcs-users] [darcs-devel] [patch639] Use utf-8 charset for darcs send in case of non-ascii ...

[Dan Pascu]

I'm seriously amazed to read such a post coming from a darcs developer. Considering the elegance of the darcs system, there is no place for such immature and vengeful approaches to solving a problem.

So if I get it right, because the locale system is a complex beast that is a pain to deal with, you think it's best to take your vengeance on the users who's only guilt is that they are forced to use a system with an enforced non-utf8 locale, when most of them don't even know what a locale is or what are they using anyway.

You may pretend you were joking to do some damage control afterwards, but you have no idea how damaging to darcs a post like this can be. If this is is the mindset of a darcs developer towards treating the darcs users, then I have serious worries about using darcs as version control system to hold my data safely for the future.
There are a lot of people that silently follow the mailing lists of the projects they use, but rarely write messages themselves. Reading messages like this, only makes them wonder if they will be shown the finger from some developer the next time they have a problem or receive a recommendation to use a different OS to solve their problem. The result is that they simply move to another version control system and never look back.

So what's the next week schedule? Kicking the Windows or OSX users in the balls?

P.S. if you leave users on their own or give them the finger when they have a problem, they'll do the same to you. So don't be surprised when darcs will have the user base of its developers.

On 7 Jul 2011, at 19:23, Gabriel Kerneis wrote:
> I was indeed kidding about the purity part.  But the point remains that locales
> and characters encodings are a real PITA, that you have no way to know which
> one people are using reliably, or to make any decision at all in some cases
> (for instance, if several commit messages contain characters in various
> encodings, the resulting "darcs send" message will be a meaningless pile of
> bits) and that the only reasonable way to sort all this out is to rely on
> people using utf-8 everywhere.
> 
> Yes, I firmly believe that users not using utf-8 should be left on their own.
> But I'll send a follow-up patch as you suggested, to be nice with that part of
> mankind and warn them that they are using a technology of the past and should
> be burnt or something like that. Because that's how life is, I guess, and this
> seems to be the only way to get this patch accepted.
> 
> Or maybe I'll do as a friend of mine suggested and submit a patch that crashes
> darcs on start-up if the current locale is not ascii or utf-8, to count the number
> of utf-8-reluctant darcs users out there ;-)
> 
> </rant>
> 

--
Dan