Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
Mark Stosberg writes:
> Our workflow is primarily built around cherry picking patches based on
> ticket numbers in the patch names (spontaneous branches). I wouldn't
> call this feature of "simpler"... I know of no VCS which an do it as
> well as darcs does.
But I *would* call it "simple." It's built around a single, memorable
idea, and requires no extensions to Darcs or complicated option
fiddling.
Ah, but I call it "complex". The darcs patch theory, upon which such
spontaneous branches are so easily built, is a pretty complex thing of
mathematical wizardry. There are few other tools that people can use on
a day-to-day basis today that even approach that level of complexity, at
least in the source control world. (The Operational Transformation (OT)
system underlying Google Wave is probably the current nearest kin to
darcs also in the wild that I know of, and I've yet to hear anyone refer
to Wave as anything other than "complex".)
The fact that darcs can make something so intricately complex seem so
damnably simple is darcs' greatest gift (and arguably greatest curse --
those edge cases when it doesn't work do break the illusion of
simplicity and can cause some tension).
However, you should be careful in comparing "darcs simple" to "git
complicated" in general.
I think it's a fair comparison: darcs makes working with something as
complex as patch theory/OT nearly as simple as it is possible to make it
seem. Why is it that git (and to a lesser extent hg) make one of the
simpler conceptual approaches ("snapshot-based DAG") so much more
complicated to work with in day-to-day practice? Sure, git may be
improving and some of that complexity is inherited dead-weight from the
rcs/cvs/svn legacy of modern source control, but you can't tell me that
UI simplicity isn't a valid comparison/concern. UX design and
"simplicity" is often seriously under-rated amongst developer-oriented
tools, which is a shame.
--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net
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