[darcs-users] so long and thanks for all the darcs

[Karl O. Pinc]

On Sun, 4 Mar 2018 12:16:13 +0100
Ben Franksen <ben.franksen at online.de> wrote:

> Am 04.03.2018 um 05:03 schrieb Karl O. Pinc:
> > On Sat, 3 Mar 2018 18:36:32 -0800
> > Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
> >   
> >> On Sat, Mar 3, 2018 at 6:26 PM, Karl O. Pinc <kop at meme.com>
> >> wrote:  
> >>> This being so, I'm curious why a darcs user would choose
> >>> git over mercurial.    
> >>
> >> Honestly, because I don't know mercurial.  I should fix that
> >> someday. My impression is that it's like git but with a more
> >> sensible command line interface, and has an elaborate plugin
> >> system with tons of extensions (which nice in a way but scary in
> >> another way).  
> > 
> > It's not that the command line interface is more sensible.  It's
> > that the mental model of a repo with which the mercurial commands
> > interact is simple.  _Almost_ as simple as darcs.  And almost
> > the same as darcs. 

> There are much more fundamental differences in the model. Darcs is the
> only tool I know of that can automatically re-order changes without
> changing patch identities

> I agree with Evan that mercurial's UI is much more sensible than git's
> and that their mental models are pretty similar. 

I'm thinking of the mental models of the end-user during typical
use.  When it comes to patch identities and re-ordering, well,
the big deal on the user side is that there's either "don't
rewrite history" or "deal with updating all repo copies so they
are consistent".  This seems universal across all revision control
systems.  But I find the feel of using darcs a lot more similar
to the feel of using mercurial than I find similarity between using
git and using mercurial.  Git introduces a whole gob of considerations
needing to be taken into account before doing anything.  It's
not just more command line options or the multiplicity of commands.
It's extra stuff related to how git is managing the
internals of the repo and other concepts needing consideration
before choosing an action.

Darcs makes revision control easy.  Mercurial makes it nearly
as easy -- especially if you ignore all the extra knobs 
available as extensions.

Regards,

Karl <kop at meme.com>
Free Software:  "You don't pay back, you pay forward."
                 -- Robert A. Heinlein