We have used darcs at my workplace for a couple of years now, and it has proved to be an extremely useful tool. In my opinion darcs was the first system to make revision control so easy that only an idiot wouldn't do it (and I could never return to a centralized system). We have, however, run into the infamous "exponential time" merge problem twice, and when that happens it is effectively an insurmountable barrier to most users. I would hate to see darcs fade into obscurity on account of this problem because it is otherwise such a nice program to use, but the fact is there are now several other distributed systems available which by all accounts do not suffer from problems like this and are also much faster than darcs. To prevent mass user discouragement before the much anticipated bug fix comes through, it would be good if someone with a deep understanding of darcs could clearly articulate, for the rest of us, (a) exactly what brings this problem on, how to avoid it, and what to do if it does happen, and (b) to counter this serious disadvantage, what advantages can darcs claim over mercurial and git?
There is some information about exponential time merge / "conflict misery" on the darcs wiki but it is selfconfessedly written by someone who does not fully understand the problem himself. If users are to have confidence that they can use darcs without running into this serious problem, they need to understand exactly what to do in order to avoid it (not just read about a single case that happened for reasons not entirely clear to the victim). As for unique positive features, which I presume are mostly consequences of darcs' underlying patch theory, these should be explicitly highlighted because they are the features we are not going to find in any other revision control system that might tempt us away from darcs. Hilary Oliver _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
