[darcs-users] Darcs Problems

[Ash Moran]

On 22 Feb 2013, at 15:37, Michael Hendricks <michael at ndrix.org> wrote:

> Here's another data point in favor of multiple branches inside a single directory.  Many developers now work in IDEs or similar tools.  These tools almost always have a notion of "project" which hardcodes a directory.  If switching branches requires switching directories, one must have multiple "projects" and synchronize configuration among them.
> 
> I rarely work in an IDE and darcs has caused me grief in this respect.  I can imagine how IDE-centric developers would feel.

There's another situation that causes a similar problem. While I don't use an IDE (Sublime Text + Terminal.app is my "IDE"), I use Guard[1], which is a tool for automatically running commands during development. It has plugins for all sorts of things, the most common/obvious one being running tests, but also for things like compiling CoffeeScript to JavaScript, restarting development servers, running static site generators and so on.

Guard is unbelievable fundamental to my workflow, and I invest a lot of time in tweaking my Guard configs so I never have to run a command by hand. But switching directory breaks it. If I have to `darcs get` into another directory to create a branch, I have to open a new set of terminals in that folder, start a second Guard, and remember to throw it all away at the end. It's currently enough of an overhead that I just don't branch - I value (rightly or wrongly) the continuous development cycle more than the advantages of branching. But not being able to branch in a DVCS doesn't sit right with me. (Maybe I'm missing an obvious solution to this.)

Ash

[1] https://github.com/guard/guard

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