Re: gub progress

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi,

On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Pedro Kröger wrote:

> Johannes Schindelin <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > Also, if you want to ditch cvs, you always leave somebody behind. For 
> > example, from what I understand, Han-Wen likes darcs very much... and I 
> > know plenty people (me included) who don't like it. Same goes for every 
> > version control system, but at least people are _used_ to cvs.
> 
> Could you tell why you don't like darcs? I'm just curious to hear. I've
> been using darcs for some time but I'm considering to try git as well.

<disclaimer>I am not trying to offend anybody. Just stating my opinions 
here, so no need to get mad at me, although you are free to call me an 
idiot.</disclaimer

I don't like darcs for several reasons:

- I need to install a completely new compiler to patch darcs (Haskell
does not bother me as much; I could learn it).

- the whole bruhaha about the "theory of patches" and that it is connected 
with some concepts from quantum mechanics is _soooo_ seagull consultant. 
It has written BS all over it.

- It is _slow_. I had the pleasure of having to work with tailor, which is 
a program to convert between different Version Control formats, and which 
is written in darcs. My experience is that git beats it any time of the 
day.

- It is buggy. When trying to convert the repository of tailor itself with 
tailor into git format, I hit a bug in darcs early on.

- It does not seem to focus on version control, but on changing the order 
of patches. Thus, it is more similar to quilt than to a version control 
system.

- It lacks a nice GUI where I can see what happened in a particular 
branch. In fact, I am not quite sure that you actually get the whole 
history, what with all the patch reordering.

- The repository format itself is fragile, just as cvs'. It is based on 
patches, so if there is one single patch corrupt, you loose the history 
from then on.

- AFAIK darcs has not even started to handle complicated merges 
gracefully. In contrast, git handles modifications in one branch, and a 
rename in the other quite well.

- git makes it _really_ easy to access older version without checking them 
out. For example, I can get the differences in lily/music.cc between 
version 1.3.108 and 2.9.7 with "git diff lilypond_1_3_108:lily/music.cc  
lilypond_2_9_7:lily/music.cc".

If I thought long and hard, I could probably come up with more reasons I 
don't like darcs, but I think you got an idea.

BTW, the git repository I set up, tracking lilypond's cvs, is still 
online. Containing all history of the cvs repository, the first download 
is about 55MB. Feel free to play with it.

Ciao,
Dscho