[darcs-users] Larry McVoy (probably) talks about darcs...

isaac jones ijones at syntaxpolice.org
Fri Nov 26 04:59:45 UTC 2004


Hi, all.

There was an interview with Tom Lord [1] of Arch fame linked from
slashdot.  Buried in the discussion was a comment about darcs,
supposedly [2] from Larry McVoy, who is a bigwig of some sort at
Bitkeeper (sorry I don't know what he does).  You'll probably recall
that BK is the version control tool that is used on the Linux kernel:

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=123076&cid=10346048

He spends most of his time talking about how hard version control is,
and how Free Software will never solve the problems that BK solved
because they're not fun and it costs a lot of money to do it right.

I don't see any reason why this should be true, and I want to cheer on
folks like David and the other darcs contributers for doing such great
work, though I know that Haskell is a pure joy to program in, so I'm
sure it hardly seems like work ;)

A lot of people have said that free software will never do one thing or
another, and they always have some logical-sounding reason.  Fortunately
for us all, free software hackers just keep on proving them wrong.

peace,

  isaac

[1] http://osdir.com/Article1687.phtml
[2] I say "supposedly" because it's an anonymous posting and who knows
if it's really him.






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