[darcs-users] Front page Edit
Stephen J. Turnbull
stephen at xemacs.org
Wed Apr 15 14:18:35 UTC 2009
Daniel Carrera writes:
> - **Easy** - Easy to learn. Easy to use. Easy branches. Easy merging.
> Most version control systems have around 60 commands (git has 133).
> Darcs attains the same or better feature set with 32.
Unfortunately, it's just not true that Darcs has the same or better
feature set as git and Mercurial. There is a whole DAG-ful of stuff
that you can do with git or Mercurial that you can't do at all with
Darcs. Specifically, of the commands I use every day, Darcs has no
equivalents for gitk, git show-branch, git branch, git reset, git
merge, and git rebase because they work on the DAG in a single repo.
> Due to their clean and simple design,
... and the repository = branch = workspace assumption ...
> Darcs’ commands are easier to learn and easier to understand.
Darcs's commands *are* well-designed. It's also true that for
small-ish projects (a couple hundred files, a couple thousand patches
or revisions, a handful of branches) the repo = branch = ws assumption
is a *killer* simplification. Those git commands that have no Darcs
counterparts are basically YAGNIs in this context. Add to that the
elimination of strategic considerations from merging branches (git has
two non-trivial merge strategies, Bazaar has maybe a dozen or so!, and
of course for all three you need to worry about the merge order), and
you've got a big, big win.
But please, let's not make claims that go overboard. Darcs *is*
missing a lot of functionality that is essential for some tasks and in
some organizations; it is not a fully functional replacement for git,
Mercurial, or even Bazaar. Especially, Darcs does not provide access
to the history DAG.
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