4 ms·

I assume you're referring to the bit about Darcs. To be fair, Pijul is an in-progress version control system, and Darcs (or the now-defunct Camp[1] project, fr

by aseipp 10y ago

I assume you're referring to the bit about Darcs. To be fair, Pijul is an in-progress version control system, and Darcs (or the now-defunct Camp[1] project, from one of my 'predecessors' in my current job) is probably the closest thing there is to Pijul in spirit, so it's sort of understandable why they would choose it. The package is available from crates.io, at least. And they plan to move to self hosting in the next release of Pijul. On the other hand, if the developers are reading this, something like a `fast-export` mirror of the repositories would be very useful for people just browsing the code. Or just any way to conveniently browse it with some syntax highlighting. Honestly, the bigger problem is there's no easy docs to glance at on how to use the library, or samples, without cloning repositories. That raises the activation effort a bit, IMO. The repository being in darcs with an `index.html` just makes this particular point a bit worse. But just documentation on the page would make it better, too. And really, `darcs` is packaged in most systems, is it not? Is it that problematic to simply install it with apt or whatever? [1] http://projects.haskell.org/camp/ http://projects.haskell.org/camp/

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago
> I assume you're referring to the bit about Darcs. Not just darcs, but also the lack of ability to look at the sources online.
mootothemax 10y ago
>Is it that problematic to simply install it with apt or whatever? It's the equivalent of having an extra couple of fields on a SaaS signup form. Sure, not everyone's going to be put off; you are going to lose some people, though.
- aseipp 10y ago
  I mean, running `apt install` is basically a requirement to build lots of software these days. And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. It's one application for the version control system, and that's only going to be used by developers, and not end users. They'll always just use `crates.io`. Besides, Pijul is going to always be using "not Git" I'm afraid - after all, it is a version control system, and they're going to dogfood it. So, given that - I doubt this complaint will ever be seen with much weight. I mean, why would it be? Their concern is creating Pijul, not necessarily getting dozens of contributors or doing the GitHub thing or capitulating to Git users or whatnot. I do consider the lack of online source browsing and online docs a significantly larger and more immediate barrier - but I already mentioned that.
  - comex 10y ago
    > And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. On source-based compilation systems like Homebrew (OS X), darcs depends on ghc, and ghc is huge (in both disk space used and compilation time). I suppose you could make a comparison to rustc - also huge, and a dependency in such a system for anything written in Rust; anyone interested in using this library is writing code in Rust, so wouldn't it be a little hypocritical to have a problem with big dependencies? Well, maybe. Personally I think Rust would significantly benefit from a way to compile to portable C code, for precisely this reason. (I know that this is harder than it sounds.) It's true that end users can just obtain the library from crates.io, though, for purposes other than browsing (which is possible with Cargo but not convenient).
    - ben0x539 10y ago
      I think we should lay the blame for that with source-based compilation systems.

by aseipp 10y ago

the_mitsuhiko 10y ago

> I assume you're referring to the bit about Darcs. Not just darcs, but also the lack of ability to look at the sources online.

mootothemax 10y ago

>Is it that problematic to simply install it with apt or whatever? It's the equivalent of having an extra couple of fields on a SaaS signup form. Sure, not everyone's going to be put off; you are going to lose some people, though.

aseipp 10y ago
I mean, running `apt install` is basically a requirement to build lots of software these days. And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. It's one application for the version control system, and that's only going to be used by developers, and not end users. They'll always just use `crates.io`. Besides, Pijul is going to always be using "not Git" I'm afraid - after all, it is a version control system, and they're going to dogfood it. So, given that - I doubt this complaint will ever be seen with much weight. I mean, why would it be? Their concern is creating Pijul, not necessarily getting dozens of contributors or doing the GitHub thing or capitulating to Git users or whatnot. I do consider the lack of online source browsing and online docs a significantly larger and more immediate barrier - but I already mentioned that.
- comex 10y ago
  > And it's not like you're installing 500 megabytes of libraries to depend on for compilation. On source-based compilation systems like Homebrew (OS X), darcs depends on ghc, and ghc is huge (in both disk space used and compilation time). I suppose you could make a comparison to rustc - also huge, and a dependency in such a system for anything written in Rust; anyone interested in using this library is writing code in Rust, so wouldn't it be a little hypocritical to have a problem with big dependencies? Well, maybe. Personally I think Rust would significantly benefit from a way to compile to portable C code, for precisely this reason. (I know that this is harder than it sounds.) It's true that end users can just obtain the library from crates.io, though, for purposes other than browsing (which is possible with Cargo but not convenient).
  - ben0x539 10y ago
    I think we should lay the blame for that with source-based compilation systems.