[Haskell-cafe] fptools in darcs now available

[Sven Panne]

Gour wrote:
> Simon Marlow (simonmar at microsoft.com) wrote:
>>Great news, thanks John.
>>
>>Is it possible to set up a two-way synch so we can move over to darcs
>>gradually?  It's not really practical for us to move over in one go,
>>we've simply accumulated too many dependencies on CVS, and there are
>>lots of people using the repo with CVS.  If we had a two-way synch, we
>>can experiment with darcs non-destructively.
> 
> Great news, thanks Simon.
> 
> Nice to hear you are considering to move to darcs.

Hmmm,

I don't want to spoil all the enthusiasm for a new tool, especially a
Haskell-based one, but being an old CVS veteran who recently fell into
love with subversion, I'd really like to know the benefits switching to
darcs. I hoped that one day the fptools will move over to subversion,
just like other projects (e.g. gcc, see http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/SvnPlan).
Basically I'm very happy with the working model of CVS, and subversion
improves the rough edges like non-atomicity, lack of renaming, complicated
administration, etc. The learning curve for CVS-aware people is extremely
low with subversion, it is very actively maintained, has tons of front ends,
editor modes, and is used by large Open Source sites like http://www.berlios.de/
and large projects.

So my question in a nutshell: Why shall we move away from the mainstream
when the rest of the world (or most of) is quite happy with CVS or is
moving to subversion? I'm not completely against it, but we should have
very, very good reasons to do so.

Cheers,
    S.

P.S.: Yes, I'm aware of other development models like the one used for the
Linux kernel, where CVS/subversion are not appropriate, but is fptools
really a similar project? I don't expect hundreds of people working in a
very distributed manner on extensions of e.g. a type checker... :-]