[tbnl-devel] TBNL survey / re-org

[Travis Cross]

Edi Weitz wrote:
>> Another project on my TBNL agenda that I started part way down was
>> seeing if I could remove some dependencies (primarily kmrcl) without
>> adding a whole lot a code to TBNL.
> 
> LispWorks/Hunchentoot doesn't use KMRCL, so that's the plan for SBCL
> and the other Lisps as well.

I had a feeling this was on your agenda as well.

>> Do you happen to be sold on the wonders of the Darcs version control
>> system? ;) If you're not strongly tied to whatever VCS you're
>> currently using, a public darcs repository could be a real boon.
> 
> You wouldn't win anything, because I immediately make a new release if
> I add new code.  Im the case of RDNZL I once tried with a public
> repository, but although several people had write access nothing came
> out of it.  The only result was that it became harder for me and I
> couldn't work offline anymore...

I suspected that, which is why I think you would like darcs.  With
darcs, everything is an offline operation - there really is no
online mode so to speak.  An online repository is simply a darcs
working copy whose files are accessible via HTTP.  You can therefore
'pull' from a HTTP repository, but not 'push' to it.  Pushing across
the web is handled via SSH or email.  Contributions to a project
such as this would likely still flow through email -- darcs just
provides some (nice) tools to facilitate making and merging those
contributions.

It really isn't a big deal though.  Right now, I have a special
weitz.de-project-updater bash/perl script which pulls the latest
releases from the website periodically and tries to merge them
against any local changes I'm working on, and then makes a commit to
my working copy if a version update has occurred.  If the project
was darcs based, of course, I could truncate that process down to
`darcs pull` :)

The feature of darcs which really hooked me is that you can
'cherry-pick' patches from one working copy to another.  The darcs
homepage is:

http://abridgegame.org/darcs/

The advanced features, offline operation model, and distributed
development capabilities, along with the conceptual elegance of the
author's "Theory of Patches" is probably why this VCS has been
attracting more and more projects in the lisp community, such as
UCW, CFFI, detachtty, CLX, araneida, etc.

(http://bc.tech.coop/blog/050710.html)

Cheers,

-- Travis