Darcs

[Simon Marlow]

Manuel M T Chakravarty wrote:
> Simon Marlow:
>>  - conflicts: working with non-trivial branches on darcs is practically
>>    impossible.  A fix is in the works, but it's not clear how long it
>>    will be before it is available in a released darcs version.
> 
> I don't think this is entirely fair.  It's trivial to have branches with 
> darcs *if* you are prepared to abandon your history on a merge.  With 
> many other (at least the non-distributed) vcs, you always lose your 
> history on a merge.  So, the conflict bug prevents us from getting the 
> added value that we would like to get from darcs, but it doesn't 
> necessarily put us into a worse position than with other vcses.

In trying to be neutral I was perhaps unfair to darcs.  Even with the 
current state of affairs I find darcs more useful than CVS when it comes to 
merging.  (however, at least with CVS we used to have annotate...)

But I do suspect the other VC systems are a lot better than `diff3` when it 
comes to merging, and they do retain history (although perhaps not in the 
first-class way that darcs does).

> (Don't get me wrong, I do hate the conflict bug and it has bitten me 
> quite badly.)
>>
>>  - speed: many operations are impractical (annotate, darcs changes
>>    <file>), and many operations just take "too long" (i.e. long enough
>>    that you go and do something else rather than wait for it to finish,
>>    which incurs a context-switch cost).
> 
> My main gripe with speed is actually pulling (esp darcs-all as it 
> involves many repos) and push, which partially is a network issue.

I almost never pull over the network.  We have a local full repo into which 
a cron job pulls ever hour, and all our local trees are duplicated from 
that.  I'm aware this workflow isn't suitable for everyone, though.

Cheers,
	Simon