Graham Klyne
You paint a fairly compelling picture. I think that the big advantage of darcs that you describe is that it can merge changes from repository to repository, rather than just from sandbox to repository. That seems useful to me, because I do use a locally-managed respository for all my work... it's the way I do backups.
I use the same feature to allow concurrent remote and local development and transparent synchronization between both repositories.
Well, maybe the fear of learning curve is because CVS is quite opaque in some respects. Your description of Darcs made it seem easy enough. Though there is still the complexity of setting up a local repository to consider.
"darcs inittree" creates a new repository in the current directory. "darcs get http://www.ScannedInAvian.org/repos/wikiwiki" sets up a local copy of a remote repository.
Other questions I have: - ease of displaying differences between working copy and repository?
"darcs whatsnew" shows you unrecorded changes.
- GUI front-end for exploring repository?
I haven't tried the wxHaskell gui, but the cgi repository browser is nice[1].
- repository-hosting requirements?
filesystem, and an http server if you want others to be able to pull from your repository.
- ease of setting up secure connections to a remote repository?
You can use ssh[2] or sudo to push to a repository
- support for CVS-like change-logs, etc ($Id: $, $Log: $, etc.)?
I don't know what's involved in CVS-like ChangeLogs, can you explain that one? I think it might be the same as "darcs changes" but I'm not sure.
From what I've seen on the mailing list, $Id and friends aren't likely, because of the design of darcs.[3].
[1]http://www.scannedinavian.org/cgi-bin/darcs links to my repo browser. [2]http://www.abridgegame.org/darcs/manual/node5.html#SECTION005100000000000000... ssh and sudo both mentioned here. [3]http://www.abridgegame.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2004-February/001089.html -- Shae Erisson - putStr $ fix("HELLO\n"++) - http://www.ScannedInAvian.org/ OSDir: Community building... interesting... what's the secret sauce? Limi: Irresponsible sleep patterns. -- Alexander Limi, one of the Plone founders http://osdir.com/Article199.phtml