[darcs-users] Easily managing over 100, 000 lines of code with darcs

[Mark Stosberg]

Hello,

I thought I'd share the metrics on our largest project we manage with
darcs:

 100,000 lines of Perl code
 127 Megs of disk storage 
 3983 files
 5 regular committers

Tools to compute the metrics
( I exclude the _darcs directory and third-party libraries in our tree )
- sloccount project
- find project -type f | wc -l
- du -hc project

###

Darcs handles a project of this size easily. Beautifully, actually.  As
someone who also uses git regularly, I can't imagine the amount of
inefficiency and overhead we would experience if we tried to switch our
workflow over to git.

You might think that this is possible by using the latest-and-greatest
darcs, but we are we are still using darcs 1.0.6 for our "beta" and
"production" repos, including the darcs-1 format. (We are able to use
the newest darcs in our personal development repos).

We find performance is quite sufficient and we are able to have a
streamlined and flexible workflow. Our graphic designer is one of our
regular committers, and she was able to readily learn and use and darcs
effectively along with the programmers.

I challenge darcs reputation for being good at "small" projects. Today I
can say that darcs is works well for projects with a 100,000 lines of
code.

Some may say "I only want to learn one source control system". After
you've learned git, I can see why you wouldn't want to go through the
effort to learn another. But darcs is far easier to learn and use.
( Just compare the basic "fix a bug" workflow!
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/GitForDarcsUsers#Fixabug ) 

Even for those who have learned git, I would consider it worthwhile to
use darcs for other projects when you can.

I've written some more about darcs vs git on my blog:
http://mark.stosberg.com/blog/darcs/

How about you: do you have a big darcs projects to share?

    Mark

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