Practical differences between Darcs and Git/Mercurial

Tom Moertel — Thu, 25 Oct 2007 16:26:00 -0400

On the Darcs Users mailing list, I ran across an interesting thread: practical differences between darcs’ patch model and git/mercurial’s?

Among the interesting points of discussion:

Do the mechanics that give rise to Darcs’s strong cherry-picking abilities also make it susceptible to naughty time-complexity behavior?
When you merge non-conflicting changes in Git or Mercurial, you must record a merge patch, which binds the two in the development timeline, but in Darcs the respective patches are free to commute. Which behavior is better for real-world development?

If you’re interested in distributed source-code management, it’s an interesting thread to follow.

Some recent reviews of distributed source-code-management systems

Tom Moertel — Mon, 14 Aug 2006 13:50:00 -0400

John Goerzen recently compared a bunch of distributed source-code-management systems in Whose Distributed VCS Is The Most Distributed? His comparison includes all of the major contenders except for SVK and monotone. He ends up favoring Darcs, which I also prefer and use to manage my projects’ code. If you’re looking for a quick overview of distributed SCM options, check out John’s comparison.

Also check out Bryce “Zooko” Wilcox-O’Hearn’s Quick Reference Guide to Free Software Decentralized Revision Control Systems, which is updated regularly. (He also likes Darcs.)

Update: fixed small typo.

Tom Moertel's Weblog: Tag vcs

Practical differences between Darcs and Git/Mercurial

Some recent reviews of distributed source-code-management systems