[Python-Dev] Subversion branch merging

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Dave Harrison writes:

 > While I can't claim to have spent alot of time with DARCS, my
 > experience was that it took a fair whack of unintuitive pain to work
 > out how to extract a patch that I could send upstream to be submitted
 > to a project.

This doesn't seem to be a common issue with Darcs, but obviously your
mileage varies.

 > I believe it also has a reputation for being rather slow.  I've
 > also noticed that repositories sometimes become "broken" and need
 > to be re-checked out - but that I'm willing to put down to some
 > other factor I'm not aware of.

Both of these are acknowledged by the core Darcs developers.  Recently
several users posted their regrets to the Darcs mailing lists, and the
developers only said something like "we're working on it, so please
come back and check."  IMO Darcs is a non-starter for a large project
at this point.

 > It also has some really cool features like "rebasing" for letting
 > your branch actively track the trunk from which you branched it.

Unfortunately, rebasing doesn't seem to be stable yet.  Sometimes it
works for me, sometimes not.  I don't know whether its because I don't
know what I'm doing, bugs in git, or changes in the calling syntax.

(NB, "git rebase" is basically just what the Arch people call "tla
update", and darcs's claim to fame is that you don't need to
distinguish between a rebase and a simple pull, darcs calculates it
for you.)