[Psi-devel] Re: Darcs

[Remko Troncon]

> You do enjoy making my life difficult, don't you?

It's either pain now or pain in a few weeks ;-)

> checking for ghc... no
> configure: error: Cannot find ghc in your path; please set the GHC  
> environment variable!!
> /var/tmp/darcs-1.0.3 %

Do you have a particular reason why you want to compile darcs  
yourself ? Does your distribution not have a darcs package ? Or can't  
you use a static build of Darcs, provided on the webpage ?

> What's so great about darcs anyway, compared to, say, Subversion ?

A lot. For one, Subversion is centralized. The decentralized model of  
Darcs (and other versioning systems) makes it very suitable for the  
way the Psi project works. This also makes merging and combining  
different branches (of which there are many for Psi) very easy, and  
makes submitting separate patches a lot easier as well.
Darcs is also very easy to grasp, compared to Subversion. Subversion  
might be easy if you are used to CVS, but it certainly isn't in  
general. Darcs is also very easy to learn if you are used to CVS.

This list can go on. Darcs made my life as a developer a lot easier,  
i can tell you that ! Especially the ability to throw around patches  
between my different branches etc. makes developing really easy.

And this is not a hasty decision. We tried looking at as many  
versioning systems as we could, and Subversion has always been our  
fallback if we couldn't find anything better. Luckily, we did.

cheers,
Remko