[darcs-users] Easily managing over 100, 000 lines of code with darcs

Max Battcher me at worldmaker.net
Wed Mar 31 19:23:00 UTC 2010


Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> Mark Stosberg writes:
>  > Our workflow is primarily built around cherry picking patches based on
>  > ticket numbers in the patch names (spontaneous branches). I wouldn't
>  > call this feature of "simpler"... I know of no VCS which an do it as
>  > well as darcs does. 
> 
> But I *would* call it "simple."  It's built around a single, memorable
> idea, and requires no extensions to Darcs or complicated option
> fiddling. 

Ah, but I call it "complex". The darcs patch theory, upon which such 
spontaneous branches are so easily built, is a pretty complex thing of 
mathematical wizardry. There are few other tools that people can use on 
a day-to-day basis today that even approach that level of complexity, at 
least in the source control world. (The Operational Transformation (OT) 
system underlying Google Wave is probably the current nearest kin to 
darcs also in the wild that I know of, and I've yet to hear anyone refer 
to Wave as anything other than "complex".)

The fact that darcs can make something so intricately complex seem so 
damnably simple is darcs' greatest gift (and arguably greatest curse -- 
those edge cases when it doesn't work do break the illusion of 
simplicity and can cause some tension).

> However, you should be careful in comparing "darcs simple" to "git
> complicated" in general.

I think it's a fair comparison: darcs makes working with something as 
complex as patch theory/OT nearly as simple as it is possible to make it 
seem. Why is it that git (and to a lesser extent hg) make one of the 
simpler conceptual approaches ("snapshot-based DAG") so much more 
complicated to work with in day-to-day practice? Sure, git may be 
improving and some of that complexity is inherited dead-weight from the 
rcs/cvs/svn legacy of modern source control, but you can't tell me that 
UI simplicity isn't a valid comparison/concern. UX design and 
"simplicity" is often seriously under-rated amongst developer-oriented 
tools, which is a shame.

--
--Max Battcher--
http://worldmaker.net


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