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Interview: David Roundy of Darcs Revision Control

Posted by samzenpus on from the what-did-he-say dept.

comforteagle writes "In the aftermath of our last interview with Tom Lord, regardless of personalities, it became apparent that the idea of decentralizing CVS is a big deal. Many mentioned darcs as an alternative to Arch. Mark Stosberg has interviewed project head-hancho David Roundy about darcs, his 'theory of patches,' what's next, and on using Haskell for the project."

4 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Haskell just won't cut it by QuantumG · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So basically you didn't read the article. He gets more developers because it is written in Haskell than he would otherwise because it's one of the few real applications that are written in Haskell - which means if you're someone who just learnt Haskell for the hell of it you've got somewhere to apply those skills.

    --
    How we know is more important than what we know.
  2. Re:Haskell just won't cut it by pnot · · Score: 5, Insightful
    You wrote:
    While "Darcs is written in a Haskell, a functional language that is relatively unknown compared to C or Perl", this really does hurt it's common use.

    How will the choice of language hurt darcs's use? Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?

    You wrote:
    Not being able to get a larger group of developers such as C, C++, or even some interpreted projects means that it becomes one or a few developers working on this project

    From the article:
    I've been surprised by the number and quality of contributors darcs has had. There seem to be quite a few people out there just looking for somewhere to use Haskell! :) And in fact, there have also been developers who learned Haskell expressly for the purpose of contributing to darcs. It's such a pleasant language to work with that I think it's more of a draw to developers than a put-off.

    So perhaps you should attempt to assimilate some facts before trotting out your tedious, ill-informed prejudices, hmmm?

    Furthermore, it's not just about the sheer number of developers, it's about the power of the language. A million monkeys writing code are still only monkeys, and the more developers you have on a project, the more co-ordination is required (read Fred Brooks' The Mythical Man-Month if you don't believe me).

    If "number of potential developers" were the only criterion for choosing a project's programming language, everything would be written in BASIC. And Paul Graham makes a good case for coding in less common languages: you'll get people smart enough to learn unusual languages for the hell of it, rather than a mass of monkeys who have little interest in building great software and just want to learn this week's marketable language to improve their employment prospects.
  3. Re:Haskell just won't cut it by Mr.+Slippery · · Score: 3, Insightful
    Why on earth would the users of a piece of software care about the language it's written in?

    If your users are FOSS developers, they quite likely care about the ability to modify the tool, which includes caring about the languate in which it is written.

    --
    Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
    You cannot wash away blood with blood
  4. Re:Theory of patches by Earlybird · · Score: 3, Insightful
    • Let me summarize the "theory of patches": you reverse patches in the opposit order of applying them.

    No. Darcs can, and will, apply patches out of order. From the Darcs manual:

    • The development of a simplified theory of patches is what originally motivated me to create darcs. This patch formalism means that darcs patches have a set of properties, which make possible manipulations that couldn't be done in other revision control systems. First, every patch is invertible. Secondly, sequential patches (i.e. patches that are created in sequence, one after the other) can be reordered, although this reordering can fail, which means the second patch is dependent on the first. Thirdly, patches which are in parallel (i.e. both patches were created by modifying identical trees) can be merged, and the result of a set of merges is independent of the order in which the merges are performed. This last property is critical to darcs' philosophy, as it means that a particular version of a source tree is fully defined by the list of patches that are in it, i.e. there is no issue regarding the order in which merges are performed.

    A distributed version control system that required all patches to be applied in order would be painful indeed to use.

    • I have to agree with many other comments: the use of haskell eliminated it as a choice for me.

    Why? Are you a Subversion contributor?