[darcs-users] Some newbie questions

[David Roundy]

On Thu, Oct 21, 2004 at 04:26:57PM +0100, Simon Liu wrote:
> 2.

(I don't have any such experience.)

> 3. Speed.  I used darcs to pull the darcs source and this seemed to
> take a long time.  Perhaps this is just the network connection, but I
> remember reading in some comparison review that darcs is quite slow
> with large source code bases.  Is this really an issue?  What about
> other users experiences?

Alas, get is the slowest operation, unless you run into the unfortunate
exponentially expensive merges (which can be avoided by experienced
users, and are a relatively high priority for post-1.0 work).

A lot of the time may be network, but every historical version of darcs is
created on-disk during the get process.  get --partial alleviates this, but
results in not having the whole history available.

I don't really know about the usability of darcs with seriously large (in
content, not time) repositories.  Some people report success, but they may
just be extra-patient or have really fast machines...

> 4. Are there many contributors to the project who are familiar with
> the patch theory and the code base in general?  I hope the project
> succeeds - I use CVS and SVN locally.  Recently my ISP lost broadband
> connectivity for two days.  If my CVS and SVN servers were hosted
> remotely, it would been very frustrating.   But it would also be
> terrible if David lost interest in darcs :-( , and there weren't any
> Haskell proficient coders out there to carry on all the good work.

I'm impressed by both the number of contributors, and their knowledge.
Judging from what I see in other peoples' answers on the mailing lists, if
I got hit by a bus, there's at least enough knowledge out there to carry on
with darcs development.  Obviously, it would be a setback (and make my
parents sad), but the main question would be whether anyone with the
knowledge and skill would also have the time for darcs development.  Many
of the very good darcs contributors seem to have rather busy lives and/or
other development projects to eat up their time.
-- 
David Roundy
http://www.abridgegame.org