[darcs-users] Goodbye Darcs

[Eric Kow]

Hi Kirill,

Many thanks for your kind words and for the recent details.

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 21:17:53 +0400, Kirill Smelkov wrote:
> But you've aged. Good ideas behind you were adopted by youth, and like it very
> often happens with experimental peojects, you've just had to hand on the baton
> to others. There are signs of you everywhere.

Echoing Simon and Mark, I am very happy to see our ideas being adopted
by other revision control software, especially the interactive recording
that serves you so well.

That said, I still believe that darcs offers something unique in the
distributed revision control world.  Instead of using clever merging
heuristics as do our worthy competitors, we use simple and exact
algorithms.  I think this is the right way to go.  One it makes it easy
for us to offer cherry picking in every darcs command (e.g send,
rollback, obliterate, revert), and two, it makes merging completly
seamless, generally a non-event.

Granted, darcs has had problems with conflicts in the past, and still
has problems with day to day performance, as you point out.  I have
reasons to be optimistic, though.  Darcs 2 gives us vastly improved
conflicts handling (albeit with the new darcs 2 repository format only),
and Ian's current research is making good progress to make sure it is
even better.

In the meantime, we are still working hard on the day to day problems.
Our top priorities are to catch up on these performance issues and also
to improve our Windows support.  We think these issues are soluble (one
idea we hope to work on is cache mapping files to patches so that diff
and annotate can go much faster).  I think we can and will complete this
work.  I intend for darcs to become something that the younger projects
can aspire to, and on a more personal note, something the Haskell
community is proud to call its own.

Thanks again, and happy sailing with git!

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9
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