Brian Smith wrote:
Sometimes there are obvious problems on Windows that don't get noticed
before release. Also, by design, the filename case handling is painful
on Windows--for example, it is not possible to pull the GHC repository
without using "--partial" on Windows due to historical changes involving
files with the same name in different cases. So, be extra careful if you
have Windows users.
The GHC developers and others have reported problems working with
repositories pulled with "--partial." I'm not sure that anybody even
knows what the cause(s) of these problems are. People have to work
around it by coping their changes to a repository pulled without
"--partial." But, then see above.
In the GHC camp we've encountered quite a few problems with darcs, more than I'd
like. If I had to give an honest appraisal of how our switch from CVS to darcs
has gone, I'd say that we're overall better off than we were with CVS, but not
nearly as well off as I'd hoped.
The problems fall roughly into the following categories:
1. The conflict bug. I think people underestimate how bad this is,
or perhaps it affects larger projects much more than smaller ones.
In GHC, several branches we have created have needed to be merged
using diff+patch, and merging has taken far more developer time
thank it should.
2. --partial problems. I've given up on partial repositories. It's
pretty random whether you get a get_extra failure when moving
patches between GHC's 6.6 and HEAD repositories if one of them is
partial; if both are partial then you are guaranteed a get_extra
failure.
3. Slowness of 'darcs changes <file>', such that we can't use the
Trac integration of darcs for GHC, or the web interface. Someone
has been working on this recently, though (but things have gone
a little quiet?). Also 'darcs annotate' is unusably slow with GHC.
4. Windows problems. I've spent a long time getting darcs working on
Windows, mainly the difficulties are around SSH and filename issues.
In comparision to #1 and #2 this is pretty minor: all the problems
are fixable, but darcs really needs the rough edges sanding off on
Windows.
Right now I'm clinging to the hope that at least #1 will be fixed at some point;
I really really don't want to switch VCs again, but darcs in its present state
can't be a long-term solution for us.
Now for the good: there are a lot of things about darcs that I love. I've grown
very attached to cherry-picking and I imagine I'd be very sad to lose it. The
Emacs darcsum mode is a huge win: single-keystroke 'darcs whatsnew', and then
you get to pick hunks to commit or revert interactively. This has saved me huge
amounts of time compared to CVS. And 'darcs send' is getting us contributions
that we probably wouldn't have had otherwise.
Cheers,
Simon
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