Re: [Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] git-darcs-import 0.1

Darrin Thompson wrote:

On Sun, Jun 1, 2008 at 2:44 PM, Bertram Felgenhauer wrote:

...

I'm pleased to announce yet another tool for importing darcs repositories to git. [...]

What's the appeal of this? I personally love git, but I thought all the cool kids at this school used darcs and that was that.

For myself, git-darcs-import itself is an opportunity to learn more about both darcs and git. It wasn't meant to be argument in the git vs. darcs discussion, although it was inevitable that it would be seen as such. I really like darcs' concepts, but in my opinion, darcs doesn't get enough power out of the theory of patches to really shine so far. This is a hard problem, and I can't offer solutions. Ideally, you'd have semantic patches which just commute with virtually all other patches because they "know" what they are about. The only thing that darcs offers in that direction - besides handling conflicts, mergers and undos gracefully, which is quite useful in itself - is a keyword substitution patch type. In the meantime, I prefer git to darcs, mainly because I'm sort of attached to seeing the development history, i.e. I prefer to think of patches as (partially) ordered instead of being a cloud of patches that darcs uses as a model. Bertram