[e-lang] Revision control for E

[zooko at zooko.com]

 Nathaniel J. Smith wrote:
>
> One more note (sorry, Zooko, but someone has to mention this):

Please don't apologize!  Thank you for your help.

> I have some
> concerns about recommending darcs to any sort of largish project... simply
> because for right now, they have some deep problems with their algorithms
> for merging (and in darcs, everything is merging).  AFAICT, it is
> reasonably common that repositories simply become wedged, and elaborate
> workarounds, including the hunting down the deletion of particular commits
> from every extant checkout, are required.

This is true (and it is one of the reasons that I tempered my recommendation
with a warning about "immaturity") except that this case isn't that common and
the workaround isn't that elaborate.

I'm a bit more comfortable recommending darcs for a project like E now than 
I was a year ago, since in the interim we've started using darcs at my
employer.  We have six active committers and a history of about three thousand
patches comprising about 150 thousand changed lines of code.  We have only (?)
once suffered a painful work stoppage due to this problem, and that was in a
sense a special case as one developer was using subversion instead of darcs and
he did something that is rather outside our normal (or recommended) workflow.

(We maintain a custom tool to automatically synchronize our subversion and
darcs repositories, which is why that developer was able to commit darcs
patches without using darcs.)

It is perfectly reasonable for the E developers to lose interest in darcs at
this point, or else to lose interest after further investigation into how this
particular bug happens.

I think I've done just about enough darcs advocacy for this particular venue,
although of course I'll continue be happy to help.  One thing about darcs is
that it is so easy to learn and to use that most questions beyond the
introductory ones are better answered by experimentation than by discussion.
For experimentation, you could try executing 
"darcs get http://zooko.com/repos/e-on-cl"...

Regards,

Zooko