Re: [darcs-users] Re: [Haskell-cafe] fptools in darcs now available

[ Hmmm, I thought I had set Reply-To: to cvs-fptools, trying again ]

Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> On Mon, 02 May 2005 00:20:40 +0200
> Sven Panne <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>>Don't get me wrong: I am quite aware of the limitations of CVS and I would
>>*never* start a fresh project with CVS.
> 
> OK, so you agree that CVS has limitations.

I've never denied that.

>>But Subversion is a very worthy
>>successor and being "the oldest" as you mentioned is a definite plus in the
>>mission-critical area of version management systems.
> 
> 
> Subversion only fixes the most obvious deficiencies of CVS, the lack of
> atomic commits and the inability to preserve history across rename
> events.

Plus an extremely easy administration with fine-grained access control,
hot backups, O(1) tagging/copying, etc. etc.

> However, there are other things that you would want to do in a revision
> control system. The main one is to set up branches and merge from branch
> to branch with as little human intervention as possible. 
> 
> SVN does not improve on CVS's rather poor across branch merging 
> capabitilites where as others like Darcs and GNU Arch do. I haven't
> use Darcs, but I have been using GUN Arch for over 12 months and
> use branches for experimental work, sometimes as many as 10 branches
> on a single projects. Arch allows me to merge from branch to branch
> pretty mucu at will.

Now we are slowly coming to technical points and use cases: What exactly
can Darcs do what "svn merge" (2-way, 3-way) can't do? Due to the atomicity
of changes one can easily merge a change set from one branch to another.
We do this every day at work in a huge project. Again: I don't want a
jihad, but I simply don't know half a dozen version management systems
in detail, so I'd like to learn the pros and cons.

Cheers,
    S.