Re: [Caml-list] [OT] Rant about VCS

From: Yaron Minsky <yminsky@gmail.com>
To: Paul Snively <psnively@mac.com>
Cc: Alex Baretta <alex@barettadeit.com>, Ocaml <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] [OT] Rant about VCS
Date: Fri, 17 Dec 2004 14:28:57 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <891bd339041217112816be753a@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <74A2EF44-505B-11D9-9DB1-000A27DEEC20@mac.com>

We use Arch here for several projects, totaling about 100kloc.  Arch
works pretty well and reliably.  It's got a bit of a learning curve,
and the usability of the command line tool is pretty horrific.  Still,
it's underlying design is very good, and it gets the job done.

Yaron

On Fri, 17 Dec 2004 10:42:51 -0800, Paul Snively <psnively@mac.com> wrote:
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> On Dec 17, 2004, at 9:07 AM, Alex Baretta wrote:
> 
> > It appeared to us that Darcs might solve the problem: it seems based
> > on a reasonably sound algebraic model and is written in Haskell, which
> > supposedly should be a bonus compared to other VCSs written in C.
> >
> > Yet, darcs lacks some of the most basic features of a VCS, such as
> > handling metadata (the executable bit, essentially). The darcs
> > developers say that this is a "planned feature" but nothing really
> > urgent. Actually, we think this is a critical feature in a big project
> > which relies on scripts and other executables distributed together
> > with the source for bootstrapping purposes. Ocaml itself ships with a
> > full compiler to be able to bootstrap, albeit this does not depend on
> > the executable bit being set anywhere since ocamlrun is generated by
> > the C compiler.
> >
> > Other VCSs such as subversion seem to be so unstable as to severely
> > discourage their use in an industrial project.
> >
> darcs is a great tool. 1.0.1 was just released. For your purposes
> you'll be interested in the "setprefs test" sub-command, which allows
> you to define a process to execute before some darcs commands--see the
> docs for details.
> 
> I use EMACS and Tuareg Mode for my O'Caml programming, so I also use
> darcsum.el to integrate EMACS and darcs. I find this quite nice.
> 
> If all of this is too much, consider GNU Arch in its tla incarnation,
> which does version file flags on POSIX filesystems, and also has very
> good EMACS integration in the form of XTLA.
> 
> Best regards,
> Paul Snively
> 
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