On Mon, 7 Mar 2005 at 15:27 -0600, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > I also looked into darcs a little bit, and my feeling was that it did > the distributed repositories and merging very nicely. And I got the > feeling its user interface was simpler than arch's. But I felt it > wasn't as mature or well documented, and its merging algorithm gave me > worries about the possibility of extreme memory consumption.
I'll pitch in for darcs, which I use exclusively on my own projects now.
I previously have used cvs (of course) and svn, and I tried tla (tom
lord's arch) once.
Darcs' user interface _is_ simpler than arch's. This is a _good_ thing.
There's no reason distributed version control has to be black magic and
completely unusable, which is my opinion of tla. That it is simpler does
not mean it is limited.
I don't know where you were looking for documentation (or when), but I
spent at least an hour trying to figure out where the best arch docs
were, and the excellent darcs docs are right there on the website.
The darcs man page is excellent, as is command-line help for the whole
suite or just that command, a la CVS. e.g.:
$ darcs get -h
Get a repository.
Options:
--repo-name=DIRECTORY path of output directory
--partial get partial repository using checkpoint
--complete get a complete copy of the repository
--to-match=PATTERN select changes up to a patch matching PATTERN
--to-patch=REGEXP select changes up to a patch matching REGEXP
--tag=REGEXP select tag matching REGEXP
--context=FILENAME version specified by the context in FILENAME
-v --verbose give verbose output
-q --quiet suppress informational output
--standard-verbosity neither verbose nor quiet output
--set-default set default repository [DEFAULT]
--no-set-default don't set default repository
--disable disable this command
-h --help shows brief description of command and its
arguments
Get is used to get a local copy of a repository.
The darcs author has impressed me as really knowing his stuff on the
theory - not just some hacker that decided to make a version control
spinoff. That makes me sleep easier.
Darcs uses one directory, in the root of your project, called _darcs.
No pollution of your home directory (tla) or special repository
locations (cvs and svn). Need a copy of a darcs repository? cp, scp, rsync, or
any other method will work just as well as the traditional darcs get command
(although that gives you more fine-grained control).
You probably got the memory concern from the author's disclaimer on his
website, at least subconsciously. I think he's being modest, or careful,
or both. I haven't tried it on large projects yet, but on the small ones
it is just fine. I know there is a kernel darcs repository, so if you
want to see how it performs on the big stuff that's an option. If it
would make a difference to anybody, I'd be happy to give that a try and
report back.
But really, what's more important than whether you use darcs or tla or
one of the handful of other distributed version control systems, is that
in many cases it is a much much better way to work, especially for open
source. You owe it to yourself to at least see what this new paradigm is
all about; you won't understand what's so cool about it until you
immerse yourself in it for a bit. If you need egging on: Linus cares,
shouldn't you?
--
.O. Hans Fugal | De gustibus non disputandum est.
..O http://hans.fugal.net | Debian, vim, mutt, ruby, text, gpg
OOO | WindowMaker, gaim, UTF-8, RISC, JS Bach
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