On Tuesday, February 07, 2006 4:45 AM David Mentre wrote: > > > > darcs: I don't like its commutable patch theory > > > 2006/2/7, Bill Page: > > > What is not to like about this theory? Could you explain? > > I found it seducing at first but I fear that DARCS patch > commutation would make the understanding of merge failure > difficult.
I have not seen any examples of this. > In general in computer science, I don't like things which are > not predictable. As I understand it, the darcs "theory of patches" is motivated by the mathematics of quantum operators -- patches are operators on the source code tree. The properties of patches are defined algebraically. So, mathematically speaking I think what darcs does is completely predictable. See: http://www.darcs.net/manual/node8.html In the context of the Axiom project, I like the association of a mathematical "theory of patches" with Axiom's source code management. Moreover, darcs is written in Haskell - a language in the same family as Axiom's SPAD and Aldor. In principle one could even implement darcs in Aldor. So for me, this is mentally a very good match. > > I've also read once a post from somebody who said that DARCS > failed on his big project and was not scalable. > Such information is at best anecdotal. I've done some pretty stupid things with both CVS and arch (tla) as well. :) But I know of no documented cases where darcs has failed when properly applied. I would consider Axiom at least a "medium-sized" project. So far I have not seen any performance problems or failures on either Unix or Windows. darcs 1.0.5 has some performance improvements - especially on windows. Older versions on Windows required setting a larger heap size because the Axiom source distribution includes some rather large binary files. Of course, as Tim Daly might have said: Source code management is now almost a religious subject - right up there beside the old "language wars" ;) so I don't suppose that this discussion can have much impact on the Axiom project as a whole. Regards, Bill Page. _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
