Comments on: Darcs and source code management

By: Programmer

Programmer — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 08:45:00 +0000

Why do they even bother with SVN improvement? It should be globally deprecated, it is just a subset of a modern VCS anyway. It doesn’t do enough well to warrant any effort. It’s not even needed to save lazy people from having to move their repo since every modern VCS has an easy way to import SVN repos.

Just let it die already.

By: Michele

Michele — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:21:42 +0000

That is surely a good thing! Not a good reason to switch back, but probably one reason less for those who wanted to switch away from SVN. My advice still goes on trying Darcs 😉

By: Jean-Daniel

Jean-Daniel — Mon, 05 May 2008 13:14:53 +0000

Note that removing all the .svn folders and replace them by a centralized directory is in the TODO list for SVN 1.5 (or 1.6 I don’t remeber).

By: Michele

Michele — Sat, 03 May 2008 23:18:03 +0000

@Jason

I didn’t know about Bazaar at all. Although I didn’t spend much time with Git or Mercurial, it looks like they are not based on the concept that a repository is identified exclusively by the set of its patches, which is the main difference between darcs and SVN from my point of view.

By: Jason Foreman

Jason Foreman — Sat, 03 May 2008 16:40:10 +0000

Git and Mercurial (and don’t forget Bazaar), are definitely not “SVN with this or that”. In fact, they are probably more like “Darcs with this or that”. They all share a distributed style similar to Darcs. Git uses a paradigm probably quite similar to the “theory of patches” as well, wherein it stores changes in content, rather than a history of files. Darcs has been around longer than any of the current generation of ‘mainstream’ DVCS though.

Last I tried to use it, Darcs had some rather severe performance problems. Maybe it has improved over the past couple years and deserves another look. But I would encourage you to not write off Git (or others) as being too like SVN. They are certainly not. Linus’ Google Tech Talk about Git, while not particularly techical, is quite entertaining and will certainly prove that Git tried to be as unlike SVN as possible.