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

[Mark Stosberg]

On 2004-11-17, John A Meinel <address@hidden> wrote:
>
> I assume darcs requires darcs mv, darcs rm, and darcs add to make things 
> work right. With tagline tla, I just put the files in place and I can 
> commit.

Something like that. It may be a little easier with darcs than it
sounds, though. If you are starting with a clean tree and good REs
for 'boring' and 'binary' files, you can just do:

 $ darcs add -r *

I think it's also relevent that darcs has simpler account for files that
are tracked and not tracked. Boring and Binary are much more more
intuitive than 'precious', which is not a concept I've ever felt I
needed. 

 From my experience with Arch, 'darcs add -r *' is noticeable faster
than visiting eary file that can use a tagline and adding one. Not to
mention the other 5% that may be binary and need to handled differently
anyway.

You do have to use "darcs mv" to move files, but that is about as easy
to remember as just 'mv', and if you forget, you will get a reminder
when reviewing your changes.

You don't always have to use 'rm' either. From the docs [1]:

"Remove should be called when you want to remove a file from your
project, but don't actually want to delete the file. Otherwise just
delete the file or directory, and darcs will notice that it has been
removed."

 1. http://www.darcs.net/manual/node7.html#SECTION00732000000000000000

It is nice that the behavior is completely consistent, unlike tagline
which doesn't work for binary files.

> I'm curious why _darcs instead of .darcs.

I understand that it's more portable to Windows. (I don't recall what 
problem Windows has was the leading dot, though). 

> I'm playing with darcs a little, unfortunately I chose the pathological 
> case of the linux kernel tree, which causes all kinds of problems. :) 
> (darcs get needs 680MB, and about 20 minutes to run.) darcs changes took 
> a really long time and then let me know I didn't set the runtime memory 
> high enough.

The Linux kernel definitely stresses darcs now. But, I think having the
kernel available as a darcs repo will challenge the project to step up
to tackle the scalability issues. 

> But I'm honestly willing to play around with it on a smaller scale. I 
> didn't find darcs own repository, though. There was a link on the main 
> page for the linux kernel, but I didn't see one for darcs itself.

darcs get http://www.abridgegame.org/repos/darcs/

    Mark