Darcs Hacking Sprint -- Summary from Portland Team
The weekend of 24-25 October 2008 was an International darcs hacking sprint! The sprint was a lot of fun and we’ll be having more. The sprint provides a very productive atmosphere for hacking.
We had a team in Brighton with posts from Day 1 and Day 2. We also had team in Paris but I don’t have a link for them.
Here are just some of the highlights from the Portland Team:-
Adding language pragmas in all files:
- makes the code cleaner when it’s time to drop ghc6.6 support
- all required language extensions are now known
- makes it easier to check for Haskell’ compatibility
- Removed OldFastPackedStrings
-
Replaced FastPackedStrings api in favor of Data.ByteString api
- lots of small optimizations, less pack/unpack, more standard ByteString code
- removed a fair bit of C code, new code compiles to same or faster assembly (Don checked)
-
cabalization:
- no autoconf or make needed
- cabal install tested and working on linux / osx, windows testing soon to follow
- builds out of the box w/ 6.8 and 6.10
- configure is much faster
- module graph (depends on cabalization)
-
Duncan improved zlib
- soon to be available on hackage
- allows us to replace our own implementation of zlib bindings with the main stream one
- will make building on windows easier
- can use lazy bytestrings
Here are some random pictures from the Portland Sprint. Packages we should consider: 
The TODO list we made on the first day: 
Checking on Team Brighton: 
Duncan and Jason looking at the projector: 
Ah, beautiful Portland in fall: 