Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: darcs vs tla

[Karel Gardas]

On Mon, 15 Nov 2004 address@hidden wrote:

> "The darcs core technology does not seem to have an inherent advantage
> over arch, but the user experience totally blows tla out of the
> water. We must make the new user experience for tla superior to darcs
> and svn, or we will arch will be doomed to obscurity."
>
> And it's portable. ( Written in Haskell, darcs is used on on many
> operating systems including Linux, MacOS X, FreeBSD, and Windows.)

It's a bit kind of irony that tla is written in C and seems to be "less
portable". :-)

Anyway, just few notes to this thread w.r.t. MICO development using
tla/darcs:

Darcs' cons:

- darcs does not support patch signing (showstopper for me)
- darcs does not support permission handling (even bigger showstopper)

Darcs' pros:

- scenario: working tree == repository looks really simple (I don't
  agree with Robert Collins that this is just tla's UI issue(s))
- interactive commands (might be added to tla too)

Anyway, what I've seen from darcs so far it looks like it is more like
BitKeeper(TM) especially because of its working tree == repository design
decision

Generally I'm playing with darcs for small MICO related developments last
few days: I'm using one darcs repo as a tla syncing point and from this
I've branched to several trees. Because of showstoppers described above,
tla is still the way to go especially with security in mind and I always
push changes to the sync point repo where I commit them to tla archive and
mirror where appropriate. On the other hand I play a bit with the idea to
also offer my mico--devel branch in the form of darcs repository to make
latest source also available to our windows developers -- as it seems
darcs is supported on Win32 platform too.

Cheers,
Karel
--
Karel Gardas                  address@hidden
ObjectSecurity Ltd.           http://www.objectsecurity.com