Distributed RVS, Darcs, tech love

[Xah Lee]

When i first heard about distributed revision control system about 2
years ago, i heard of Darcs, which is written in Haskell. I was hugely
excited, thinking about the functional programing i love, and the no-
side effect pure system i idolize, and the technology of human animal
i rapture in daily.

I have no serious actual need to use a revision system (RVS) in recent
years, so i never really tried Darcs (nor using any RVS). I just
thought the new-fangled distributed tech in combination of Haskell was
great.

About few months ago, i was updating a 6-year old page i wrote on unix
tools: ( http://xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/usoft.html ) and i was
trying to update myself on the current state of art of revision
systems. I read Wikipedia this passage:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darcs

« Darcs currently has a number of significant bugs (see e.g. [1]). The
most severe of them is "the Conflict bug" - an exponential blowup in
time needed to perform conflict resolution during merges, reaching
into the hours and days for "large" repositories. A redesign of the
repository format and wide-ranging changes in the codebase are planned
in order to fix this bug, and work on this is planned to start in
Spring 2007 [2].  »

This somewhat bursted my bubble, as there always was some doubt in the
back of my mind about just how Darcs is not just a fantasy-ware
trumpeted by a bunch of functional tech geekers. (i heard of Darcs in
irc emacs and haskell channels, who are often student and hobbiests
programers)

Also, in my light research, it was to my surprise, that Darcs is not
the only distributed systems, and perhaps not the first one neither,
contrary to my impressions. In fact, today there are quite a LOT
distributed revision systems, actually as a norm. When one looks into
these, such as Git ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_(software) ) one
finds that some of them are already in practical industrial use for
large projects, as opposed to Darcs's academic/hobbist kind of
community.

In addition to these findings, one additional that greatly pissed me
off entirely about Darcs, is the intro of the author (David Roundy)'s
essay about his (questionable-sounding) “theory of patches” used in
Darcs. ( http://darcs.net/manual/node8.html#Patch )

Here's the 2 passages:

«I think a little background on the author is in order. I am a
physicist, and think like a physicist. The proofs and theorems given
here are what I would call ``physicist'' proofs and theorems, which is
to say that while the proofs may not be rigorous, they are practical,
and the theorems are intended to give physical insight. It would be
great to have a mathematician work on this, but I am not a
mathematician, and don't care for math.»

«From the beginning of this theory, which originated as the result of
a series of email discussions with Tom Lord, I have looked at patches
as being analogous to the operators of quantum mechanics. I include in
this appendix footnotes explaining the theory of patches in terms of
the theory of quantum mechanics. I know that for most people this
won't help at all, but many of my friends (and as I write this all
three of darcs' users) are physicists, and this will be helpful to
them. To non-physicists, perhaps it will provide some insight into how
at least this physicist thinks.»

I love math. I respect Math. I'm nothing but a menial servant to
Mathematics. Who the fuck is this David guy, who proclaims that he's
no mathematician, then proceed to tell us he dosen't fucking care
about math? Then, he went on about HIS personal fucking zeal for
physics, in particular injecting the highly quacky “quantum mechanics”
with impunity.

  Xah
  xah at xahlee.org
∑ http://xahlee.org/