I'm a great fan of darcs, and also have never run into the performance and
reliability issues that GHC has. That said, it's clear that they *have* run
into them, and if something else makes GHC development go more smoothly,
then I'm 100% supportive of their using it.
It is disappointing, though that (I agree with you here) git and others have
a fundamentally bad model for performing the task. They chose that model
for pragmatic reasons... it's operationally clearer, even if the meaning of
things is a bit more muddled. Making a working znd pragmatic version
control system using a darcs-ish model is simply a harder job than doing the
same in the git/hg way. I use darcs whenever I can, and think they have
done an excellent job by and large; but you won't find a single darcs
developer who thinks they have completely accomplished the task.
On Apr 23, 2011 5:57 AM, "Andrew Coppin"
On 21/04/2011 11:16 PM, John Millikin wrote:
My chief complaint is that it's built on "patch theory", which is ill-defined and doesn't seem particularly useful. The Bazaar/Git/Mercurial DAG model is much easier to understand and work with.
Possibly as a consequence of its shaky foundation, Darcs is much slower than the competition -- this becomes noticeable for even very small repositories, when doing a lot of branching and merging.
I think it's been kept alive in the Haskell community out of pure "eat our dogfood" instinct; IMO if having a VCS written in Haskell is important, it would be better to just write a new implementation of an existing tool. Of course, nobody cares that much about what language their VCS is written in, generally.
Ah, how silly of me. I should have known a question like this was highly likely to provoke a flamewar.
I had assumed that the way Darcs was is *the definition of* what "distributed version control" is. So it was a bit of a shock to read about how Git works, and discovered that it does it totally wrong. So I want and read about Mercural and all the others, and discovered that they all do it wrong too.
Given that the way Darcs works is so superior to the way everything else works, I was just puzzled as to why even GHC is trying to get rid of it.
It seems the answer is some combination of "performance issues" (I've never seen any) and "reliability issues" (which again I've never come across).
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