On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 08:04 +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
There's also the fact that using in-repo branches means that all the tooling doesn't have to rely on any (fs-specific) conventions for finding branches.
As someone who has admin'd a reasonably large Bazaar setup (where branch == directory similarly to Darcs) I can honestly say that this would be a HUGE boon.
Just keep in mind that adding branches withing the repository is a massive increase in the conceptual complexity of the system, and it would IMO be very un-darcs-like to adopt something like that into the core mental model you need to use a darcs repository, only because of incidental conveniences (by "incidental" here, I mean that there is nothing wrong with the darcs model; it *is* true that branches and repositories are the same thing -- but it just turns out that, often, developers want several repositories for the same project). It seems to me the same problems could be solved without the necessary increase in complexity by: (a) Keeping repositories in sibling directories with names. (b) Keeping a working directory that you build in as one of these, and switching it to match various other named repositories as needed. Then your build files are still there. Surely there are things darcs could do to make some of those bits easier to do remotely (ssh to a remote machine in order to darcs-get from one directory to a new one is a pain, for sure). But those can be offered without in-repo branches, at the advantage of not really affecting people that don't use them. Convention, rather than baking answers into tools, is the right way to solve organizational problems, and that's essentially what we're talking about here. And adding complexity every time someone has an awkward use case will lead (has led, in more systems than I can count) to an unusable result in the end. -- Chris Smith