[darcs-users] Report after triaging 2.8 release blocker: what remains to be done

[Simon Michael]

On 11/1/11 6:29 AM, Mark Stosberg wrote:
> Releases are sign of vitality for both users and developers. As someone
> who has maintained some Perl projects for several years, I've learned
> it's a morale booster for contributers to make a contribution, and see
> that quickly turned around and appear in a release.

Hey Mark.. I fully agree with the general points you're making here. I just want to be clear that I feel darcs is a 
special case right now, because:

1. We have failed to stick to a time-based release schedule, so most folks will perceive and evaluate the next release 
as a feature release. What we say won't change this much.

2. With strong competition, a long-running perception of flaws, and a recent history of regressions, darcs needs to be 
more careful than most projects to avoid marketing setbacks and build confidence and interest.

>   http://blog.darcs.net/
>
> It's a "weekly" news item, but it's dated back to July (a bad sign). The
> top item is an announcement that 2.8 will appear in August, but August
> has come and gone with no follow-up (another bad sign).

That post may have been premature, or circumstances simply changed. The right thing in this case was to have new posts 
explaining the new status, since the release just wasn't ready.

> As it stands on the blog, it looks like darcs suddenly went dormant in
> July. What I saw from the ChangeLog review was very different story--
> there about 1,000 patches that are basically read to be released in a
> new version!

That's exactly what happened. The background flow of patches continued (great) but let's not overestimate what we have 
to show users. The great majority of those 1000 patches are code cleanups, packaging updates, test maintenance and the 
like (excellent and important, but not too interesting in the release notes.)

> I also disagree that "--packs" would be the only thing of interest to
> users. In my ChangeLogging, I found a number of new user-visible
> subcommands that were added, removed or changed. There are really a
> number of things happening with this release.
>
> Perhaps I could summarize the user-visible stuff in a blog post which
> could both increase interest among users, and help motivate developers
> to wrap things up.

Sounds great, please do and/or list them here. Note http://wiki.darcs.net/changes%20since%202.5 isn't finished, there 
are some things yet to be harvested from the patch list.

Best - Simon