To clarify: I'll say that the person complaining a...

2009-04-24T17:26:00.000-04:00

To clarify: I'll say that the person complaining about darcs "guessing" (because he saw a type called 'Hopefully') was wrong. Darcs never guesses. This is not to say that darcs does not have bugs, just that it takes the idea of safely reordering patches very very seriously.

Thanks for posting that! It would be good if we c...

2009-04-24T17:19:00.000-04:00

Thanks for posting that!

It would be good if we could walk through all the out-of-date and never-in-date bits as well and the parts which are genuine problems. Here are some things I've spotted.

True: darcs requires GHC to build, which in turn can be slow to install. There's not much we can do about that, except point people to the fact that binary packages for GHC and for darcs exist. I'll bet most people complaining about this are building darcs with MacPorts, and are experiencing the joy of bootstrapping GHC.

True: darcs does not support push over HTTP. But now you can darcs send over HTTP and on the server end, have a script that does whatever you want with the patches it receives.

Incorrect: darcs never guesses. That's the whole point of it. All this "patch theory" stuff is so that darcs can safely reorder patches, i.e. without changing their meaning. The darcs guarantee is that the same set of patches in any order that it permits gives the same result.

True: darcs is patch-based and not history based. The equivalent to a version in darcs is a set of patches. You can get an exact version of a repository by using the "context file" mechanism (which corresponds to a list of patch names).

Out of date: Yes, now there is http://patch-tag.com which offers darcs hosting.

Clarification: The exponential merge stuff requires a --darcs-2 format repository

Clarification: In the darcs world, commits are just patches that collect a bunch of primitive patches (we call them changes). It's all cherry picking to us, because it's the same exact code that makes interactive darcs pull work, as interactive darcs record, as well as everything else, like interactive darcs revert, unrecord, obliterate and send. Also, the point of darcs cherry picking is that it pays attention to dependencies between patches. If you refuse to pull a patch, darcs will refuse to let you pull things that depend on it. We think this is a good thing, but we would agree that there are occasions where you'd want some sloppier than that.

Update: I think darcs get --partial should be deprecated, and that folks should use hashed repsoitories with darcs get --lazy instead. It's more robust.

Finally: I would be curious to learn more about $Q's crashes and database corruption.

Comments on sartak: 200 IRC messages about darcs

To clarify: I'll say that the person complaining a...

Thanks for posting that! It would be good if we c...