[Arx-users] Why not ArX?

[Kevin Smith]

Greetings,

Recently, I asked myself: Why isn't ArX getting much attention?

Here's the background behind that question: I am completely sold on the 
concept of distributed version control, so I have been researching and 
experimenting for about a year now. I have evaluated (to varying 
depths): arch, ArX, monotone, darcs, codeville, and archipel.

Of those, ArX and monotone seem the most promising for my own projects. 
Both are in C++. ArX is substantially more stable. Yet monotone seems to 
have a much more active discussion list, and seems to have several 
active code contributors. That seems odd.

My first thought was that people might be ignoring ArX because they 
believe it is merely a pale fork of arch (which it clearly is not). But 
when I did a little research, I see that ArX is simply flying under the 
radar. The following pages include lists of distributed version control 
systems:

 http://better-scm.berlios.de/
 http://www.venge.net/monotone/others.html
 http://www.thefreecountry.com/programming/versioncontrol.shtml
 http://zooko.com/revision_control_quick_ref.html
 http://dmoz.org/Computers/Software/Configuration_Management/Tools/
 http://www.cmcrossroads.com/bradapp/links/scm-links.html#Free_CM_Tools
 http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Apps/scm.html

None of them mention ArX (except the last one, where it is mentioned in 
the arch paragraph). There are probably other similar lists out there. 
There are also prominent articles like these that omit ArX:

 http://www.dwheeler.com/essays/scm.html
 http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/onlamp/2004/01/29/scm_overview.html

And there are some relevant blogs:
 http://sourcefrog.net/weblog/software/vc/
 http://del.icio.us/tv/version-control

So now I'm thinking that the biggest reason people aren't joining the 
ArX community in larger numbers is that ArX is a hard project to find 
out about. Monotone has had strong buzz for a while, as has arch. Even 
darcs hit the spotlight recently with its 1.0 release.

Is it time to crank up an ArX marketing machine? Would it be better to 
wait a bit for the 2.x series to mature a little more?

Unfortunately, since deciding to evalutate ArX a few weeks ago, I 
haven't actually been able to use it on real tasks. So although I still 
hope ArX turns out to be as good as it looks, I'm not yet in a position 
where I can publicly state that it's a great tool.

However, I would be very willing to help raise awareness of ArX. Here 
are some concrete marketing tasks that might increase ArX adoption, and 
some of which I would be willing to help with:

- Submit ArX to the maintainers of pages like those mentioned above
- Submit release news items to lwn.net
- Create .rpm .deb and gentoo ebuilds
- Write articles for lwn, newsforge, etc
- Make the ArX home page prettier
- Port ArX to MS Windows (and Mac OS X)

Kevin