Ben Wheeler

I’ve been using darcs for a few months, trying to figure out whether it is right for replacing CVS at my place of work. I find plenty to love about it but a few important things hold me back.

• I miss the concept of version numbers and RCS Keyword replacement, though if the former were available, the latter could be worked around.
• It needs more hooks. There should be a hook pre and post every command that changes the repo.
• Needs to honour, or version, the x-bit, though I think the latter is planned.
• I like the flexibility of patch names, but I don’t like the flexibility of patch names. :-) I would rather let darcs generate the actual patch name, so I know it’s unique, and allow searching through the full text of patch descriptions for keywords such as Bug IDs fixed etc – I want people to describe in detail, and itemised, the changes they have made in a particular patch, but the one-line patch name thing encourages the opposite. I guess I could write a wrapper script to ask what I think are the right questions, generate a patch name myself, and feed this to ‘darcs record –logfile’, but this would require asking the questions before asking which changes to record.

CategoryHomepage