On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 1:29 PM, Andrew Coppin <andrewcoppin@btinternet.com> wrote:

I'm sure this must be a VFAQ, but... There seems to be universal agreement that Darcs is a nice idea, but is unsuitable for "real" projects. Even GHC keeps talking about getting rid of Darcs. Can anybody tell me what the "problems" with Darcs actually are?

It's been documented in the GHC discussions, on reddit, and elsewhere. I would encourage you to look at the darcs-users mailing list archives and the ghc archives.

My personal summary is as follows:

* There is religion/fan-boy-ism around git and in general vcs is subject to network effects.

* Github enables a level of collaboration that is hard to get with darcs. Some people say this as: Github is the best thing about git.

* Performance concerns (for example, darcs annotate needs too much time/memory).

* Conflict merging issues (patch theory has flaws that lead to exponential time merges).

Darcs has some additional flaws that people complain about, but which I don't think are core to the issue:

* Conflict markers are hard to understand

* patches as a set instead of linear history (patch soup complaints)

* It's written in Haskell

* It's not popular enough

* People say they just don't get patch theory

I hope that helps,

Jason