[Haskell-cafe] Re: [darcs-devel] announcing darcs 2.0.0pre3

[zooko]

On Jan 31, 2008, at 9:15 AM, David Roundy wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 09:47:06AM -0600, John Goerzen wrote:
>>
>> I have one concern though, and it's a big one.  On your DarcsTwo  
>> page,
>> it says:
>>
>>   Darcs get is now much faster, and always operates in a "lazy"
>>   fashion, meaning that patches are downloaded only when they are
>>   needed. . . if the source repository disappears, or you lose  
>> network
>>   connectivity, some operations may fail. I do not believe these
>>   dangers will prove particularly problematic, but we may need to
>>   fine-tune the user interface to make it more clear what is going  
>> on.
>>
>> To me, that's a showstopper.

I would suggest that strict get should be the default and lazy is a  
command-line option.

Strict is what is expected by all current users of darcs-1, plus all  
users of git, bzr, monotone, mercurial, etc..

Note that this kind of unpleasant surprise doesn't arise only when  
using a remote repository.  I myself did "darcs get local1 local2",  
then, thinking that I had just made a complete copy of the history,  
did "rm -rf local1".

http://bugs.darcs.net/issue617

Fortunately, this was not my only copy of this repository, but it  
could have been.

Regards,

Zooko