My employment, and the project organization

[Brian Rice]

Hello all,

For the past year, I have been working under contract for a large 
company, and not really discussed what I was involved with, and kept it 
separate from my work on Slate. Today, that contract ended, so I am 
taking (at least) a few months to focus directly on the project.

In particular, I intend to finish up the important sections that I have 
been holding up, such as concurrency, tools, and the UI architecture, 
and also to work on funding relationships so that Lee and I can work on 
the project full-time.

An issue which is growing and I want to address is how contributions 
are working, particularly that we are using CVS, and that there are 
many people without access but working on supplementary projects, and 
CVS and its characteristics are getting in the way of being able to 
manage all of this. So what I'd like to know is whether a new 
versioning system would be welcome.

My top candidate is darcs (http://abridgegame.org/darcs/ , binaries 
available here: 
http://www.scannedinavian.org/DarcsWiki/CategoryBinaries). It's written 
in Haskell (not an issue if the binaries work for you), and has some 
issues with very large source repositories (much larger than what we 
are doing with Slate), but overall has a nice command interface and a 
lot of features and generality that CVS/SVN do not have. If you are not 
familiar with it, please check out the manual.

What I want this to do for us is to allow us to maintain trees of our 
own as necessary and not worry about stuff outside having a hard time 
tracking the tree on the server. In particular, it should make the 
packaging of changes and publishing them quite easy; basically 
everything is done with the tool itself instead of having to make a 
file archive and email it, and incorporation just means merging trees 
on the server. This can also be done incrementally - branches are very 
easily maintained and re-merged.

If there is a problem that you have installing it and using it, please 
let me know. There are other similar tools like GNU arch, but they are 
less user-friendly so I'd prefer to stick with this choice if at all 
possible.

I also want to spend a significant amount of time making sure that the 
project is usable for your needs; that it's actually useful. So to that 
end I need some testing of the ExternalLibrary (src/lib/extlib.slate) 
interfaces, and some criticism to see how it could be made better. 
Attila has been the primary maintainer of it, and it's gradually 
improving, but I want to make sure we reach a really usable state soon 
so that external bindings can be made and grown rapidly without an 
annoying amount of maintenance.

Let me know your comments and concerns. Thanks! :-)

--
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
http://tunes.org/~water/