I have been using darcs as my version control software of choice for close to 3 years now. It is a pretty solid VCS with a very competent team of developers. I have been using it for all of my projects. Recently, I was working on merging changesets for my CakePHP-modifications project with a recent CakePHP snapshot. I ran into the problem where darcs would hang on apply and the last time I tested, it took over 5 hours to apply the patch.

The problem with CakePHP-modifications hanging darcs was no biggie. That is until I ran into the problem again when I decided I wanted to merge several branches of one project into one central repository. This time, darcs was hanging on a changeset that is a dependency of other changesets.

I posted the problem on the darcs mailing list using the CakePHP-modifications repository as an example. Judging from the responses I got, the development team is working on fixing the problem. The fix could take a while however.

One response on another thread on the mailing list seems to summarize the current problems with darcs. Out of the 9 problems listed there, I have encountered #1, #3, #7, #8, and #9. So far, the only feature that keeps me from switching to another VCS completely is that darcs allows you to select individual hunks that you want to commit. This is a very useful feature as it allows you to accumulate changes and then be able to sort them out upon commit.

I have began using [Mercurial][mercurial] on a new project and I am considering switching from darcs while things get sorted out. However, I have a large number of darcs changesets that I need to be able to convert into Mercurial changesets. I have tried using [Tailor.py][tailor] on one project and it appears to work well, however it does not propagate tags and I still haven’t figured out how to move tags between repository types.

Mercurial is nice, but I am beginning to miss darcs already. I really hope those showstopper problems get fixed soon.

[mercurial]: http://www.selenic.com/mercurial/wiki/ “Mercurial Website” [tailor]: http://darcs.net/DarcsWiki/Tailor “Tailor.py”

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 10th, 2007 at 4:55 pm and is filed under Code and Consequences. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.