[darcs-users] Re: Where Arch is going

Stephen J. Turnbull stephen at xemacs.org
Fri Jun 3 06:53:17 UTC 2005


>>>>> "zooko" == zooko  <zooko at zooko.com> writes:

    zooko> P.S.  A revision control tool is something which works only
    zooko> by interacting intimately with one or more skilled humans.

And a development process.  One of the things that the arch community
spent a lot of time on (at least up until I had to drastically curtail
my OSS devel and observation time about 6 months ago) was discussing
(formally, a little; informally, a lot) what kind of development
process leads to high probability of successful merge.

According to the feature list, baz has already knocked off a big chunk
of the UI infelicities of larch/tla, and bzr seems to have a bunch
more in the pipeline.  If you're willing to discipline yourself (and
colleagues) to a particular usage pattern for branches, darcs's main
special features (ie, patch algebra and superior merging of "hard"
patches) may simply be irrelevant.  I suspect that baz will support
building higher-level tools better than darcs (which is very
interactive), which will give it a decided edge in "disciplined"
projects.

What I personally find most interesting is darcs's explicit support
for non-hunk-oriented patch operators.  (Of course, any system with
proper support for directory operations does, but darcs makes this
explict, both in the documents and by including token replacement
patches.)  In other words, darcs is pointing toward a different vision
of source editing, one not limited to standard text editors.  (I also
think that is going to undermine the whole idea of patch algebra; what
time I have available is backing a port to category theory.  See
Antonio Regidor García's post "The theory of patches"
<20050603023411.60260.qmail at web26205.mail.ukl.yahoo.com>, which is
halfway there.)

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.




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