[Haskell-cafe] Why not Darcs?

[John Millikin]

On Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:16:07 PM UTC-7, John Meacham wrote:
>
> Um, the patch theory is what makes darcs "just work". There is no need
> to understand it any more than you have to know VLSI design to
> understand how your computer works. The end result is that darcs
> repositories don't get corrupted and the order you integrate patches
> doesn't affect things meaning cherrypicking is painless.


This is how it's *supposed* to work. My chief complaints with PT are:

   - Metadata about branches and merges gets lost. This makes later 
   examination of the merge history impossible, or at least unfeasibly 
   difficult.
   - Every commit needs --ask-deps , because the automatic dependency 
   detector can only detect automatic changes (and not things like adding a new 
   function in a different module)
   - The order patches are integrated still matters (it's impossible for it 
   to not matter), but there's no longer any direct support for ordering them, 
   so large merges become very manual.
   - If you ever merge in the wrong order, future merges will begin 
   consuming more and more CPU time until the repository "dies". Undoing this 
   requires using darcs-fastconvert and performing manual surgery on the export 
   files.
   
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