Darcs2 Prerelease
Levi referred me to a post entitled “How I stopped missing Darcs and started loving Git”. It’s an interesting read, but ironically the thing that interested me most was a comment mentioning that just yesterday darcs 2.0.0pre1 was released. It looks like some very exciting things are coming down the darcs pipe:
- It should no longer be possible to confuse darcs or freeze it indefinitely by merging conflicting changes.
- Identical primitive changes no longer conflict.
- Darcs get is now much faster, and always operates in a “lazy” fashion, meaning that patches are downloaded only when they are needed.
- Darcs now supports caching of patches and file contents to reduce bandwidth and save disk space.
- Speed improvements.
The most exciting change is, of course, the elimination of the exponential merge. This is very good news indeed, if it means what I think it means. The second change I listed is also very interesting to me. You’ll remember I posited that exact situation in a previous post, and was teased incessantly as a result.
Do read the release notes. If darcs2 is released within a reasonable time frame, it will continue to be a strong contender.