Nat!'s Web Journal

So I gave darcs a try. I think the way it handles repositories is really good, as darcs doesn't organize them. That's left up to the user. This simplifies the user interface and the concepts to learn a whole lot. I expect to give darcs another look when a 2.0 release is announced. I am not going to use darcs now, because of one single event, which turned me off completely. I can't reproduce it, but it went something like this.

I created a repository at home and synced it up with the remote server. Then I added some files locally but forgot to push them up. At work I pulled the remote servers repository down and saw that I missed all my files. As I had them at work also, and also slightly improved, I added them locally there and pushed them up. When I came back home and tried to pull in the changes, darcs just hang.That's just something I don't want to happen three months down the road.

An architectural problem with darcs is, that it holds apparently everything in memory, so for big projects it would read the whole repository into RAM, for some operations. That's not very impressive.

I got a nice letter from Mark Stosberg, which made it neccessary to correct my previous entry Looking past CVS and he turned my attention to the "baz" fork of arch. Bazaar as it's called is a modified version of arch, that is soleley dedicated to improving the user interface. I am going to check this out over the weekend.