[Haskell-cafe] New book: Real-World Haskell!

[Matthew Sackman]

At Fri, 25 May 2007 12:23:24 -0500, "Doug Kirk" <doug at dkirk.com> wrote:
> I realise that everyone wants to eat their own dog food, but really,
> if you want the code samples to be available to the masses, you'll use
> Subversion instead of darcs.
> 
> No offense to the darcs creators, but
> 
> 1) Only current Haskellers use it; everyone else either uses
> Subversion or is migrating to it;

I have to say, I think that's utter rubbish. Maybe five years ago,
people were actually excited about subversion. Today however, the
amount of attention that Git, Mercurial, Monotone and others gets
really shows that people finally are comfortable with DVCS and happy
to use it.

I refer you to this post[0] by one of the lead Monotone developers, in
particular the last paragraph:

 For whatever it's worth, I'm actually quite pleased with the result. I
 don't really see these systems as competing as much as co-evolving, and
 enabling massive increase in the rate of free software evolution. In the
 early 2000s, anyone I described this sort of tool to thought it was
 crazy and would never work. Merge *after* commit? Branches with
 *multiple* heads? *Content addresses* in history graphs? *No* canonical
 servers? Now all this is the standard, and we're quibbling over who does
 it fastest. Who cares? The battle is won: DVCS technology works
 fantastically well -- using the model we pioneered -- and free
 implementations of it are absorbing many major projects. That's cause
 for celebration.

Lots of open source projects use Git, beyond the kernel. Mozilla has
just switched to Mercurial. I know of lots of projects using Monotone
(interestingly, many of these seem to be in-house commercial closed
source projects). I don't know of anyone choosing subversion over a
DVCS. (On the other hand, I don't know of anyone outside immediate
"haskellers" using Darcs.)

Matthew

[0] http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/monotone-devel/2007-04/msg00149.html
-- 
Matthew Sackman
http://www.wellquite.org/