[darcs-users] David's darcs [Was: Re: darcs patch: ...]

[Petr Rockai]

Hi,

I know this has been lying around for a while. I took the time today to
investigate in what shape David's darcs branch is. It claims to fix issue1014
(and I believe it does). However, doing "hard" merges, David's darcs now hangs
even before asking for patches, making exchange of patches between
hard-to-merge repos impossible (even for the easy patches). I believe this is a
side-effect of the refactors and is something we would better wait to be
resolved.

The other, more important issue is that neither our nor David's darcs is able
to merge the repositories in any reasonable time. I gave both about 30 minutes
of CPU time to try the merge, and also tries a number of simpler pulls without
any useful results. Moreover, both exhibit the "mergeConflictingNons failed in
geteff with ix' bug.

This basically means, that unless either of the darcsen fixes those exponential
bugs (and the mergeConflictingNons one) that the branches are divorced.

There are likely some choices:
- abandon current darcs core altogether
- try to fix it ourselves
- try to merge David's work manually (and hope that he eventually fixes the
  bugs in the core we care about)

I am starting to think that it would make sense (at least for me) to finish
some work on the 2.4 release (with the current core), and then focus on moving
along. The current darcs core is, unless major changes occur within the
development team, as good as dead.

What do people think?

Yours,
   Petr.