Re: Kragen Sitaker on Why Darcs Rocks

zooko <zooko-F7hWHBaSm8MAvxtiuMwx3w@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

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

Surely importing tarballs doesn't really stress the things that make
darcs nice, does it?

And the speed (36 changesets in 82 minutes, IIUC including the time to
untar the tarballs and so on, so not scripted, I guess?) doesn't seem
especially remarkable for a project that grew to 1000 lines.

There's the issue of noticing when files were added or deleted, I
guess, and darcs' interactive features would help with that I suppose?

But surely you could use (for example) git just as easily (indeed, I
know it's possible because I used git a few days ago to import some
versions of openssl from tarballs---something that (IIRC, some time
ago) darcs failed to do because openssl's build system is weird and
different versions appear to contain slightly different mixtures of
machine-generated Makefiles).

What am I missing?

I see the strength of darcs being (primarily) the nifty interactive
mode for recording some changes to files, and the unusual merging
features provided by recording and reordering patches.  And those
really are nice, along with the simple user interface.  Its ability to
import tarballs of a small amount of code doesn't seem very exciting.

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