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[Arx-users] Ease of use (was: Why not ArX?)


From: Kevin Smith
Subject: [Arx-users] Ease of use (was: Why not ArX?)
Date: Thu, 02 Dec 2004 09:25:57 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla Thunderbird 0.8 (X11/20040916)

Walter Landry wrote:
Kevin Smith <address@hidden> wrote:

I think one of the biggest strengths of ArX is that it is actually usable on small projects, by people who are very comfortable with CVS. That is definitely not true with tla, and is even a bit of a stretch with monotone. I think ArX is approaching the ease of darcs (basic tasks are easy to do), which is great.


Making things easier was one of the bigger drivers in how ArX evolved.

I can tell! I agree with virtually every big change you made in 2.0. You managed to address almost every gripe I had with tla and ArX 1.x.

I don't think it is quite as easy as darcs yet for small projects,
partly because you still have to think about archives.  I have thought
a little about making a darcs-like workflow, where the archive is
created within the directory.  That is more long-term.

Actually, the ArX approach has two advantages over the darcs way:

1. ArX is more like CVS. New users coming to darcs all face an AHA! moment at some point when they realize that a working directory IS a repository. For many, that moment comes after days or weeks of use.

2. ArX makes it easier to juggle multiple branches. I got frustrated with darcs when I ended up with several related branches, randomly scattered across my system, and I couldn't remember which was newer, which was temporary junk, etc. Using darcs requires more discipline and organization, which should /will be documented as darcs tips and best practices.

So for an incoming CVS user, I think ArX may even feel more comfortable than darcs. It's at least in the same ballpark, which is great, since everyone raves about darcs being easy. I haven't done a serious analysis yet, but for common tasks I think the two are comparable.

Speaking of ease of use, have you considered using -m instead of -s to specify a log message for commit? As a cvs and darcs user, I keep wanting to use -m. What does "s" stand for, anyway?

Kevin




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