[darcs-users] About darcs darcs repo as an darcs usage example...

Hi, every now and then, someone mentions the size of the darcs darcs repo as the measure of where darcs scales. I'd like to warn people that before they do that, they should mention, that darcs darcs repo is anxiously avoiding any of the more troublesome aspects of darcs. Eg. there are very few conflict resolutions in darcs darcs repo. We impose a very strict workflow on our contributors, which very few projects will be willing to adopt (even in darcs itself, there's a fair amount of dissent). Other workflows will result in many more conflict resolutions, sometimes in conflict fights and repos of size of the darcs repo could wind up unusable due to merging slowness and bugs (we tried to branch darcs repo with anything other than minor changes twice, both attempts resulting in massive problems with merging and ultimately loss of the branch due to its un-usability). We should keep our marketing honest. I wouldn't recommend using darcs to any medium project (ie. more than a couple hundred patches and a single, at most two contributors) without a darcs expert on board. At least not until the core is either rewritten or debugged. To put it simply, while darcs is smart, it's not reliable, and in an RCS, that's a catastrophe waiting to happen. Yours, Petr. PS: This is partly in response to http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/834pj/why_i_love_darcs/ and in particular this: "A good estimate of a repository size that darcs handles well is the darcs darcs repository, which has around 7000 patches over 6 years with 160 contributors." I have no intention of getting a reddit account to post the response there... -- Peter Rockai | me()mornfall!net | prockai()redhat!com http://blog.mornfall.net | http://web.mornfall.net "In My Egotistical Opinion, most people's C programs should be indented six feet downward and covered with dirt." -- Blair P. Houghton on the subject of C program indentation