[Haskell-cafe] A small Darcs anomoly

[Chris Smith]

On Thu, 2011-04-28 at 08:04 +0200, Bardur Arantsson wrote:
> There's also the fact that using in-repo branches means that all the 
> tooling doesn't have to rely on any (fs-specific) conventions for 
> finding branches.
> 
> As someone who has admin'd a reasonably large Bazaar setup (where
branch 
> == directory similarly to Darcs) I can honestly say that this would be
a 
> HUGE boon.

Just keep in mind that adding branches withing the repository is a
massive increase in the conceptual complexity of the system, and it
would IMO be very un-darcs-like to adopt something like that into the
core mental model you need to use a darcs repository, only because of
incidental conveniences (by "incidental" here, I mean that there is
nothing wrong with the darcs model; it *is* true that branches and
repositories are the same thing -- but it just turns out that, often,
developers want several repositories for the same project).

It seems to me the same problems could be solved without the necessary
increase in complexity by:

(a) Keeping repositories in sibling directories with names.

(b) Keeping a working directory that you build in as one of these, and
switching it to match various other named repositories as needed.  Then
your build files are still there.

Surely there are things darcs could do to make some of those bits easier
to do remotely (ssh to a remote machine in order to darcs-get from one
directory to a new one is a pain, for sure).  But those can be offered
without in-repo branches, at the advantage of not really affecting
people that don't use them.

Convention, rather than baking answers into tools, is the right way to
solve organizational problems, and that's essentially what we're talking
about here.  And adding complexity every time someone has an awkward use
case will lead (has led, in more systems than I can count) to an
unusable result in the end.

-- 
Chris Smith