[Haskell-cafe] Why not Darcs?

[Chris Smith]

I'm a great fan of darcs, and also have never run into the performance and
reliability issues that GHC has.  That said, it's clear that they *have* run
into them, and if something else makes GHC development go more smoothly,
then I'm 100% supportive of their using it.

It is disappointing, though that (I agree with you here) git and others have
a fundamentally bad model for performing the task.  They chose that model
for pragmatic reasons... it's operationally clearer, even if the meaning of
things is a bit more muddled.  Making a working znd pragmatic version
control system using a darcs-ish model is simply a harder job than doing the
same in the git/hg way.  I use darcs whenever I can, and think they have
done an excellent job by and large; but you won't find a single darcs
developer who thinks they have completely accomplished the task.
On Apr 23, 2011 5:57 AM, "Andrew Coppin" <andrewcoppin at btinternet.com>
wrote:
> 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).
>
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