[darcs-users] current status of darcs

[Brian Smith]

On 3/6/07, William Morgan <wmorgan-darcs at masanjin.net> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> A project I'm working on wants to switch away from CVS to SVN. I'm
> thinking about recommending darcs to them instead. I can make many
> convincing arguments for the usefulness of distributed, changset-based
> VC, but what I don't have a sense of is how stable and reliable darcs
> is. I'll be in big trouble if things go awry. :)


The conflict hanging is still the most significant issue with Darcs. Unless
you are using Darcs for a single-branch, single-user project, you WILL run
into this problem. From what I've read, fixing this problem requires
redesigning and rewriting a lot of the core logic in Darcs. This problem has
been discussed a lot but there doesn't seem to be any concrete progress
being made to resolve the issue.

Sometimes there are obvious problems on Windows that don't get noticed
before release.  Also, by design, the filename case handling is painful on
Windows--for example, it is not possible to pull the GHC repository without
using "--partial" on Windows due to historical changes involving files with
the same name in different cases. So, be extra careful if you have Windows
users.

The GHC developers and others have reported problems working with
repositories pulled with "--partial." I'm not sure that anybody even knows
what the cause(s) of these problems are. People have to work around it by
coping their changes to a repository pulled without "--partial." But, then
see above.

If you and your coworkers can live with the above problems, then Darcs is
probably a good choice. But, Mercurial also seems like a good choice for
most potential users of Darcs and it does not have the above problems.

- Brian
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/attachments/20070306/4b63cb8c/attachment.htm