so long and thanks for all the darcs

I recently switched my main project from darcs to git.

I'm mentioning it because I feel like it might be one of the larger
and older darcs repos out there, with the exception of darcs itself
(10 years, 6328 patches, around 140k lines of haskell).  The reasons
were that I wanted to use both diff and whatsnew (2.10 has broken
diff, >2.10 has working diff (I think), but very slow whatsnew), and I
wanted in-repo branches.  Separate repos directories have their
advantages, but practically speaking it's nice to able to back up
everything with a single git push --all, and being really easy to
stick notes and partial work into a new branch means I tend to
actually do that.  I have lost work due to not bothering to push a
branch to hub.darcs.net... my own fault, but ease of use is important.
There are a few other quibbles, like how obliterate -O is too slow to
be useful, conflict markers don't label their sections, ^Z out of
editing a commit message can badly hose the terminal, and you need an
obscure DARCS_DONT_ESCAPE_8BIT to show utf8 properly, but any complex
tool has its share of those kind of things.

I think the main thing is the feeling that darcs development is not
moving very quickly, so bugs and regressions take a long time to be
noticed, and then to be fixed.  And then of course that it's
increasingly non-mainstream compared to git + github or gitlab, and
probably causes people to think twice before getting involved.  I
dislike a monoculture too but you can only die on so many hills at
once :)

But I still think darcs is and has always been great, and I'm sad to
go, so I wanted to thank everyone involved with its development.  I
will surely miss darcs every time I have to do a rebase just to pull a
patch, or have to stash things just to merge, or silently lose changes
due to weird interactions between working set, cache, and repo, or
forced pushes due to rebase mess silently destroying commits, etc.
The darcs export process was mostly trouble-free, except it still
seems to have some bugs related to case-insensitive filesystems, but
redoing it on linux solved the problem.  So thanks for that feature as
well, it's one of the things that gave me confidence to stick with
darcs for as long as I did.

So that's my final experience report and "exit interview", I hope it's
interesting and useful!