[darcs-users] A comparison of Darcs and Git

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Marc Weber writes:

 > > > Probably this is so much work that nobody will ever implement it.
 > > That was the consensus regarding a "smart" replace operation.
 > > See also "structured editing".

I disagree.  I think within five years you'll see this happening.

 > I asked at #git now. Git can't find out on which commits a commit
 > depends. So if you get conflicts you can start searching those commits.

git currently can't do that, but it wouldn't be hard to implement.
You start with "git log --numstat <commit>" which will give you a list
of changed files.  For each file pipe "git log -p ..<commit> <file>"
into a Python or Perl script that keeps a database of touched lines.
This would presumbly be rather slower (multipass, for one thing) than
Darcs which keeps the necessary information in the patches.

 > So if you have to move many patches consider using darcs.
 > If you expect to have a very linear history only git may be the better
 > choice.

I would say the opposite, except that maybe we have different
definitions of "linear".  I would say that a history which always
reconverges rapidly to the mainline is linear, even though there may
be a lot of concurrent development going on at any given time.  Darcs
is good at this.  A history with multiple long-lived branches is
nonlinear, even if each branch is locally perfectly linear.  git is
good at that.