Kragen Sitaker on Why Darcs Rocks

Dear revctrl folks:

This is the first quantitative measurement of the benefits of the  
darcs user interface and workflow.

Of course, there are obvious limitations to the accuracy of this  
measurement, but in the absence of statistically significant,  
controlled empirical data, we should pay attention to ad hoc  
empirical data:

http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-tol/2007-April/000861.html

Kragen wrote:

> I've just been importing the change history for the Bicicleta project
> (stored as a series of .tar.gz source tree snapshots, stone-age-style)
> into darcs.  Often I've claimed that darcs is nice because it keeps
> the user-interface excise to a minimum, compared to other
> source-control systems; this is a sort of natural experience for how
> small that excise really is, since I'm currently doing almost nothing
> but dealing with darcs (and tar).
>
> I've just recorded 36 changesets in 82 minutes, so the average
> inter-changeset interval has been about 2.3 minutes, about 140
> seconds.  This is on a project with around 1000 lines of code as of
> the last changeset; the changesets I've currently committed represent
> about seven nights of work over two weeks.
>
> This 140-second excise means that darcs makes it practical to record
> changesets for work units as small as half an hour.  It looks like
> most of the changesets I'm currently recording represent about an hour
> of work.
>
> Some of those 140 seconds are consumed by navigating and extracting
> the tar.gz snapshots, so darcs by itself is even more convenient.
>
> Darcs rocks.
>
> (P.S. some time after writing the above, I finished all of this
> importation work, with a total of 80 changesets.  I'll push them out
> soon.)


Regards,

Zooko