On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 01:55:26AM +0200, Juliusz Chroboczek wrote: > > The fact that this problem occurs rather often suggests that there are > > serious issues with darcs as it stands. > > I think we are all aware of that. In its current state, Darcs has > been a great research project, and has borne some very interesting > results: > > - the ``repos as an unordered set of patches'' mostly works and is > easy on the brain; > - it is possible to design a VC system with a user interface made > for humans. > > On the other hand, Darcs has four very serious and one moderately > serious issue: > > - Darcs is not complete (some patches fail to commute); > - Darcs is not correct (will sometimes write an incorrect repo); > - Darcs is subject to combinatorial explosion; > - Darcs is coded inefficiently in some areas. > > It is not entirely clear to me what the right thing to do is -- work > on improving Darcs, or throw away everything and start again from > scratch now that we all know so much more. I really wish I had the > opportunity to buy a few pints to David, Erik, Tommy, Ian and whoever > else and discuss all of this.
Certainly; I think darcs is far too old for a first-system. It needs a complete rewrite, and I would like to do this myself. The main reason I haven't done this is lack of adequate documentation. Over in Greater Haskell Land you can learn the results of most good ideas in the form of the creator's 800-page doctoral thesis. Too bad David Roundy isn't a CS major :) (Specifically, the documentation isn't very precise and doesn't give me much of a clue about what mergers and conflictors are, or even which is used for what circumstance. I've already invented a conflict semantics of my own, but I'd like to be compatible with darcs :) ) Stefan
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