Hi all,
I've been using darcs on and off since 2003, but don't hang out
here much. Anyway, I'm doing my bi-annual revue all all things RCS,
and was looking at comparing DARCS and Monotone.
It seems that one potential advantage that Monotone has is that it
has really strong data integrity guarantees. Everything is
checksummed. Darcs has its advantages too, but I'm guessing I don't
need to mention them here :).
It doesn't seem that Darcs has a similar integrity guarantee
(please correct me if I've missed it). There is 'darcs check' that
can "Check the repository for consistency. Check verifies that the
patches stored in the repository, when successively applied to an
empty tree, properly recreate the stored pristine tree." But this
just checks that the patches and pristine tree are consistent. It
does not check that they are the same as someone else's copies, or
that things haven't become corrupted over time. Darcs also checksums
patches (and uses it as part of the patch name - not sure if it is
actually used as a checksum), but this doesn't give me the end-to-end
guarantees that I'd like.
Adding checksum capability to Darcs is interesting, because the
patches can be changed. I feel this also makes the end-to-end
checksum feature more desirable. One option would be to include a
checksum of the pristine tree in each tag patch and/or checkpoint.
One could then modify 'darcs check' to have an option to check the
stored checksums as those patches are checked.
Might this checksum already be there in the git compatibility
work? If I were to write a patch to add this, would it be accepted?
Cheers,
Will :-}
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