[darcs-users] Re: Subversion vs DARCS (was: Moving sf.net CVS to cryptomonkey.net Subversion)

[Zooko]

[I, Zooko, wrote the lines prepended with "> > ".]
[David Roundy wrote the lines prepended with "> ".]

> > Section 4: why DARCS is speeecial
...
> > Section 4.a: conflict management at the level of patches instead of
> > branches
...
> > Section 4.b: cherry-picking of patches
...

> I think this section is just a little overly optimistic.

:-)  I'm glad that you are honest enough to say so.

I'm still interested in trying it out, if only for my own edification.

> I would love to create a graphical merge tool that would give you all sorts
> of interesting options, but currently the state of haskell GUI libraries is
> a bit discouraging.  I probably will start with creating an interactive
> text merge tool, but even that is a relatively low priority.

FWIW, I usually dislike graphical tools.  It's good for the program to display 
graphics to me -- graphics have much higher bandwidth than text does.  But it 
is bad for the program to require input from me in the form of menu-selections- 
and-mouse-clicks.  Menu-selections-and-mouse-clicks have *lower* bandwidth 
than text does, and more importantly they aren't programmable.

I *think* that the ideal merge tool that I want just tells me which patches 
are the specific cause of the merge conflict, and otherwise it behaves just 
like CVS does.

> One thing that occurred to me that you might not have considered is that
> darcs hasn't been ported to windows.  I took a look at mnet but didn't
> immediately see if it ran on windows.  Darcs could certainly be ported to
> windows (and maybe even without too much work), but I'm not going to do it,
> as I don't have windows.  It does run on MacOS X, though.

Definitely a drawback!  But has anyone tried it on cygwin?

Regards,

Zooko