Re: Darcs

From: Martin Langhoff <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>
Date: Jun 24, 2007, 20:45 UTC
Message-ID: <46a038f90706241345m4b5ecb80p9f4ec840993023e0@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: <alpine.LFD.0.98.0706241030540.3593@woody.linux-foundation.org>

On 6/25/07, Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org> wrote:

Show 5 quoted lines

> Ahh, a chance to flame! I will never back down from such a challenge!
>
> Darcs is .. umm .. ehh..
>
> "Academic".

OTOH, and from the POV of someone closely following the SCM tools in the last few years (and using almost all of them), darcs was the first usable DSCM in the camp. I am not sure how much of its commandline user interface was borrowed from BK or elsewhere, but darcs was _easy_, where Arch was extremely hard to use.

The darcs commandset (init, push, pull) is what git, hg and bzr have today in common. At least _I_ learned about how it could be easy by watching people use Darcs (and feeling very ashamed of my baroque Arch usage). The focus on patch tracking (as opposed to "snapshot" tracking) and the whole patch algebra are two misfires I'd say. Snapshot-tracking DSCMs are winning (faster and fundamentally more reliable), and the patch algebra doesn't quite scale and (as far as I've heard) sometimes ends in unsolvable corner cases.

And the closer we get to Darcs UI the happier I feel ;-)

cheers,

martin