[Haskell-cafe] Why not Darcs?

John Millikin jmillikin at gmail.com
Fri Apr 22 00:16:18 CEST 2011


My chief complaint is that it's built on "patch theory", which is 
ill-defined and doesn't seem particularly useful. The Bazaar/Git/Mercurial 
DAG model is much easier to understand and work with.

Possibly as a consequence of its shaky foundation, Darcs is much slower than 
the competition -- this becomes noticeable for even very small repositories, 
when doing a lot of branching and merging.

I think it's been kept alive in the Haskell community out of pure "eat our 
dogfood" instinct; IMO if having a VCS written in Haskell is important, it 
would be better to just write a new implementation of an existing tool. Of 
course, nobody cares that much about what language their VCS is written in, 
generally.

Beyond that, the feeling I get of the three major DVCS alternatives is:

git: Used by Linux kernel hackers, and Rails plugin developers who think 
they're more important than Linux kernel hackers

hg/bzr: Used by people who don't like git's UI, and flipped heads/tails when 
picking a DVCS (hg and bzr are basically equivalent)
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