Um, the patch theory is what makes darcs "just work". There is no need
to understand it any more than you have to know VLSI design to
understand how your computer works. The end result is that darcs
repositories don't get corrupted and the order you integrate patches
doesn't affect things meaning cherrypicking is painless.
I think the main problem with patch theory is with its PR. It is a
super cool algorithm and rightly droundy should be proud of it so he
highlighted it. I think this caused people to think they had to
understand the patch theory rather than just sit back and enjoy it.
Incidentally, I wrote a github like site based around darcs a few
years ago at codehole.org. It is just used internally by me for
certain projects. but if people were interested, I could resume work
on it and make it public.
John
On Thu, Apr 21, 2011 at 3:16 PM, John Millikin <jmilli...@gmail.com> 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.
>
> 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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>
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