Re: so long and thanks for all the darcs

Am 04.03.2018 um 02:54 schrieb Evan Laforge:
> 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.

I agree that in-repo branches are useful and I too miss them in darcs
from time to time. I have ideas how to incorporate them in darcs-3 but
there is no code yet.

> There are a few other quibbles, like how obliterate -O is too slow to
> be useful,

(perhaps we should have made --no-minimize the default?)

> conflict markers don't label their sections, ^Z out of
> editing a commit message can badly hose the terminal,

I guess that is on Windows (it would be ^D or rather ^C on Linux and it
works there). Our Windows support is lacking, sadly, mostly because I
have not yet managed to set up an environment where I can build and test
on Windows.

> 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.

True. Just to mention it, I fixed this particular problem some time ago
(not yet released, partly because it doesn't yet work on Windows as well
as on Linux, see below).

> 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.

Yes, that's a problem. We are basically down to three main developers
and I am the only one remaining who has the time to dig deep inside and
fix things at the core.

> 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 :)

;-) I have chosen to die on this one and don't expect many others to
stay at my side... and I do need a somewhat longer break every now and then.

> 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!

Very much, thank you!

Cheers
Ben