[darcs-users] darcs, I love you

[Zooko O'Whielacronx]

Me too!

I've bzr a bit, hg a bit, and git every day for a few months at my new
job. My experiences so far make me like darcs more. There are only two
advantages that git has over darcs (for my uses):

1. short, secure identifiers [1], [2], [3], [4]
2. faster

Git's short, secure identifiers are a deeply important feature that
many people are building beautiful new things on top of, such as
homebrew [5], which threatens to turn into a dominant cross-platform,
cross-language packaging and distribution tool in the future. Without
short secure identifiers, a revision control tool is limited to being
used only in a small group of mutually trusting people. With that
feature, a revision control tool can scale to arbitrarily large groups
of cooperating people.

Git's performance advantage over darcs doesn't seem like a huge deal
to me currently, although I know it was a huge problem to my
programming partner Brian on his Mac OS X system. I hope that the
existence of the darcs benchmarking project [6] will narrow that gap
in the future.

Other than those two issues, I very much prefer darcs's supported
workflows such as first-class cherry-picking, and I much prefer
darcs's user experience, clarity of concept, and documentation.

Regards,

Zooko

[1] http://bugs.darcs.net/issue992
[2] http://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/darcs-users/2009-June/020262.html
[3] http://ftp.newartisans.com/pub/git.from.bottom.up.pdf
[4] http://book.git-scm.com/1_the_git_object_model.html
[5] http://github.com/mxcl/homebrew
[6] http://wiki.darcs.net/Benchmarks