The Fugue

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:

1. It should no longer be possible to confuse darcs or freeze it indefinitely by merging conflicting changes.
2. Identical primitive changes no longer conflict.
3. Darcs get is now much faster, and always operates in a "lazy" fashion, meaning that patches are downloaded only when they are needed.
4. Darcs now supports caching of patches and file contents to reduce bandwidth and save disk space.
5. 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.