[Haskell-cafe] Why not Darcs?

[Andrew Coppin]

On 21/04/2011 11:16 PM, John Millikin wrote:
> 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.

Ah, how silly of me. I should have known a question like this was highly 
likely to provoke a flamewar.

I had assumed that the way Darcs was is *the definition of* what 
"distributed version control" is. So it was a bit of a shock to read 
about how Git works, and discovered that it does it totally wrong. So I 
want and read about Mercural and all the others, and discovered that 
they all do it wrong too.

Given that the way Darcs works is so superior to the way everything else 
works, I was just puzzled as to why even GHC is trying to get rid of it.

It seems the answer is some combination of "performance issues" (I've 
never seen any) and "reliability issues" (which again I've never come 
across).