Hi,
On 12.07.05, Richard Smith wrote:
"Darcs is decentralized, based on a "theory of patches" with roots in quantum mechanics."
Sorry, but I'd rather not use a system which describes it's working
The author is a physicist. He attacked the problem of revision control the same way he approached his research into quantum physics.
I have nothing against quantum physics, in fact that is what I'm doing in my "academic life". Being a physicists myself, I am, however, a bit sensible when people try to take concepts from modern physics and claim that they are relevant for a completely unrelated field. But that's my personal point of view, and I certainly do not want to say that darcs is a bad system just because of this kind of "advertisement".
principle in such a way - I really don't know what quantum mechanics and version control systems should have in common.
Each patch is treated as a quantum unit in his system. A tree is comprised of a set of patches. Its very similar to the way that gnu-arch and git work. But don't let all that talk scare you. darcs is _very_ easy to work with. I find its easier than Subversion and _much_ easier than Arch.
If I understood git correctly, it doesn't store any patches but always the full versions of the files and the state of the tree, identified by some hash. On the other hand, it seems like darcs really stores the patches themselves. I hope, it stores a copy of the last version, as well, otherwise I'd certainly not entrust my data to it.
At least read this recommendation before you bail...
Thanks for the link. Although I highly esteem the quality of LWN, I'm still not convinced. Actually the main reason for not switching to something like darcs, is that when it comes to version-control systems, I prefer to be pretty mainstream. The reason for this simple is that I want to have such a system being maintained even after a few years. Advanced features like the support for sophisticated branching and merging algorithms or methodologies are really secondary for me. That's why I always had in mind to use Subversion for a new project.
And actually, I today found some time to read a little bit in the Subversion book (which actually is an excellent resource and another reason to choose this VCS). And, since I finally managed to upgrade the luga.de Apache server to Apache 2, it was really straightforward to setup a Subversion-DAV-Repository. And here it is:
https://www.luga.de/svn/PyTone/
Read-only access is available to everybody, write access currently only to me. But if there should be some serious interest in getting write access, I'd happily provide that.
Alex, thanks again for your offer to host the repository. I really was considering to accept it, but then the Subversion repository was so simple to setup...
Jörg