[darcs-users] Re: current status of darcs

Max Battcher me at worldmaker.net
Wed Mar 7 23:31:36 UTC 2007


On 3/6/07, Tassilo Horn <tassilo at member.fsf.org> wrote:
> William Morgan <wmorgan-darcs at masanjin.net> writes:
>
> Hi William,
>
> > 1. The first question on the FAQ mentions certain types of conflicts can
> >    cause darcs to hang. It then points to a bugreport that is a year
> >    old. Is this still an issue? Is it a common occurrence? In such a
> >    situation, is it easy to solve, or difficult?
>
> Some days ago I've read an Blog article which compares Darcs, Mercurial,
> git and Bazaar-ng [1]. Beside the performance of the initial import
> darcs compares quite good, but the article concludes with the sentence

As far as the performance, there's a particular penalty involved
because he mentions that his tests were with an entirely binary
repository.  Darcs handles text files much, much more efficiently than
binary files and so a text-file repository might have been a better
test.

>   "Darcs still reportedly has a deep, serious bug. Don't use it (though
>   it is nice)."
>
> Is the above bug meant? Is it really that serious? Dunno, at least I can
> say that I use darcs for all my own projects and for other free-software
> projects I'm working on, e.g. EMMS, and it definitely rocks.

It probably is in reference to the conflicts issue.  That's probably
the only "big bug" out there.

The current conflicts code is unfortunately on the order of an
exponential function.  I've personally never had an issue with it,
across a wide variety of "small"-ish repositories.  I've seen one
repository (of a friend) that was affected by it *once* (a pull took a
handful of very noticeable minutes) and the friend hasn't see the
problem since.  The larger the repository, the more conflicts
developed, and the more people involved with the repository, the more
potential there is for it to develop said problems.  It certainly
appears to be a high-priority (if deeply entrenched and mentally hard
to contemplate) issue to deal with.  I'm definitely hopeful that we'll
see a resolution in this domain sooner rather than later.  If anyone
is truly interested in the full state of this problem there is a
mailing list dedicated to solving it.

-- 
--Max Battcher--
http://www.worldmaker.net/
All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of
every organism to live beyond its income. --Samuel Butler



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