[darcs-users] Bitkeeper and Eclipse questions

[Sean Perry]

Mark Greenbank wrote:
> Hello, I'm considering moving from Bitkeeper to darcs and I have a
> couple of questions:
> 
> 1) What are the main differences between Bitkeeper and darcs? Does
> darcs have any strenghts (apart from the open licence) over Bitkeeper?
> Vice versa?
> 

there are some implementation details but to the user it doesn't matter 
much.

bk wins for having nice merge tools, revision history tools and trigger 
/ script support. In general bk has nice tools (gui or not) for getting 
at a lot of information. This boils down to bk being 4+ years old at 
this point.

darcs will likely catch up, but it needs at least another year. 
Lingering doubts about performance, no support for symlinks, lack of 
triggers, and missing tools top the list of concerns.

I have used bk daily for the last 2 years. Been using darcs for about 2 
months for personal (small) projects. I like darcs but I would not use 
it with a team of 10 people and a looming deadline. No one really has 
good info on year plus old repositories. At work we were starting to 
have serious issues with the bk repo because of the amount history in 
the tree. Simple clones are taking 5 gb. Even with the solid support of 
BitMover, pruning and preening the tree takes time and effort.

Simple summary -- be an early adopter, play with it. Use it for your own 
personal toy projects.

No offense is intended by this mail. David, the rest of the crew are 
doing a great job of addressing darcs issues. This is simply a matter of 
maturity. You wouldn't trust your email to just any old mail daemon, 
would you?