darcs rocks
by Bijan Parsia
I’ve known of darcs, the version control system, for many years. It definitely had a cool factor: written in Haskell, based on a clear “theory of patches”, decentralized, etc. etc.
I had been using SVN for paper writing. Since, I primarily write in text based formats like LaTeX, it worked rather well. Much better, naturally, than emailing documents around. I’m afraid a few years back I gave Kendall a hard time for wanting to use darcs with me. To be fair to me (and I always want to be fair to me), we were working for the same group which did have a strong de facto standardization on SVN.
Since I came to Manchester, I’ve been sorta sponging of Ye Old Mindswap SVN for papers. (Which is fine when I’m collaborating with Mindswappers. Also, I am a UMCP student! Bernardo, on the other hand, has no excuse.) Which is ok, but now that I am actually trying to maintain my school home page, and trying to keep my dissertation in synch on two computers, I needed to do something.
darcs is my solution. It works like a dream. It works locally, off line, without a nasty install. I’ve not gotten the email or the remote stuff working yet and I don’t care. I can use a USB drive if I have to.
If it turns to be a little more zero install than I’ve found (i.e., I don’t want to install it on my university shell account, but I do want to maintain a repository there…I don’t think that’s possible, alas), then I will do the happy hoggy dance!
