I'm a great fan of darcs, and also have never run into the performance and reliability issues that GHC has. That said, it's clear that they *have* run into them, and if something else makes GHC development go more smoothly, then I'm 100% supportive of their using it.
It is disappointing, though that (I agree with you here) git and others have a fundamentally bad model for performing the task. They chose that model for pragmatic reasons... it's operationally clearer, even if the meaning of things is a bit more muddled. Making a working znd pragmatic version control system using a darcs-ish model is simply a harder job than doing the same in the git/hg way. I use darcs whenever I can, and think they have done an excellent job by and large; but you won't find a single darcs developer who thinks they have completely accomplished the task. On Apr 23, 2011 5:57 AM, "Andrew Coppin" <andrewcop...@btinternet.com> wrote: > On 21/04/2011 11:16 PM, John Millikin 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. > > Ah, how silly of me. I should have known a question like this was highly > likely to provoke a flamewar. > > I had assumed that the way Darcs was is *the definition of* what > "distributed version control" is. So it was a bit of a shock to read > about how Git works, and discovered that it does it totally wrong. So I > want and read about Mercural and all the others, and discovered that > they all do it wrong too. > > Given that the way Darcs works is so superior to the way everything else > works, I was just puzzled as to why even GHC is trying to get rid of it. > > It seems the answer is some combination of "performance issues" (I've > never seen any) and "reliability issues" (which again I've never come > across). > > _______________________________________________ > Haskell-Cafe mailing list > Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
_______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe