tempus fugit

I blogged a fair bit about darcs some time ago, but since then I’ve not been able to get comfortable with the patch algebra’s approach to dealing with conflicting merges — I think mostly because it doesn’t provide a way for the user to instruct darcs on how to recover from a conflict and continue on. I’ve had a look at bzr since then, but it just feels slow, to the point where I tend to rsync things around instead of using it properly, and it just generally hasn’t felt comfortable.

On the other hand, a whole bunch of other folks I respect have been a bit more decisive than I have on this, and from where I sit, there’s been a notable trend:

Keith Packard, Oct 2006
Repository formats matter, Tyrannical SCM selection
Ted Tso, Mar 2007
Git and hg
Joey Hess, Oct 2007
Git transitions, etckeeper, git archive as distro package format

Of course, Rusty swings the other way, as do the OpenSolaris guys. The OpenSolaris conclusions seem mostly out of date if you’re able to use git 1.5, and I haven’t learnt quilt to miss its mode of operation the way Rusty does. And as far as the basics go, Carl Worth did an interesting exercise in translating an introduction to Mercurial into the equivalent for git, so that looks okay for git too.

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