Re: Darcs

["Martin Langhoff" <martin.langhoff@gmail.com>]

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