[darcs-users] Re: svk

[John Goerzen]

On 2004-11-12, Dustin Sallings <dustin at spy.net> wrote:
>
> On Nov 11, 2004, at 20:16, John Goerzen wrote:
>
>> From my initial glance, it looks like it's quite similar to darcs, but
>> based on the Subversion FS.
>
> 	Subversion is rather scary to me, as is perl.  I would have a lot of 
> trouble trusting my code to something that combines the two.

OK, but I'm not really asking if it looks scary to people.  I'm more
interested in how it compares with darcs in its approach.  I'm not
trying to make a judgment, but I think it helps everyone to understand
what all is out there and how they relate to each other.

For my own sake, I'm not using darcs for anything major, and won't until
the behavior of spinning for hours (days?) while handling simple, small
patches is resolved.  That's scary to me. :-)  (Though I did just tell
the Arch list that as soon as that's resolved, I'm likely to switch.)

I have used Subversion for several years -- since 2001 or so.  (That
ranks well before even the first alpha-quality release version.)  In all
that time, I have never once any data.  It is true that there were
several changes to the way things were stored during development, but a
simple dump/load always brought things along fine.  And even this hasn't
been an issue since 1.0.  In short, I completely trust Subversion to be
safe.

I share your concern about Perl.  Some people have that concern about
Haskell (I don't).  Some people have it about C, shell, whatever else.
I for one remain open to it being possible to write quality software
using Perl, even if it doesn't happen often :-)

-- John