[darcs-users] Re: What's better, Darcs or Mercurial?

[Matt Mackall]

On Mon, Feb 20, 2006 at 09:09:30PM +0100, Radoslaw Szkodzinski wrote:
> Ruini Xue wrote:
> > 
> >    I found distributed VCS is what I want, however there are so many of
> > them. After some basic reading, I want to choose between
> >    darcs and mercurial.  But I can no decide which is better, or what's
> > their main differences and how about their future development?
> > 
> 
> Better for what? What is the project/commit/file size?
> Is the project going to receive a lot of conflicting patches?
> 
> Major differences:
> - In Darcs you can enforce that a testsuite is run before committing

You can do that with commit hooks in Mercurial.

> - Darcs has less well-compressed format, but not by much
> - Darcs has some problems with very large repositories - patch applying
> can take a long time
> - Darcs doesn't provide a special, optimised transfer protocol
> - Darcs is better at conflict resolution (because its patch hunks
> are better designed)
> - Darcs' programming language is Haskell, which is compiled.
> Mercurial is in Python - interpreted language as of yet.

Python is compiled - to portable byte code. Not sure why this is
interesting.

> - There's no kernel repository clone in Darcs anymore.
> - Darcs stores binary files more efficiently I think.

Really?

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.