[darcs-devel] the straw that broke the camel's back

Juliusz Chroboczek Juliusz.Chroboczek at pps.jussieu.fr
Thu Jul 12 16:55:26 PDT 2007


> 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.

                                        Juliusz


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