[kowey]

Hi all! As a Darcs developer (mostly cheerleader), I'd like to make a general comment that Darcs should be seen more as a version control system we're trying to build than one you should use right away. Please keep an eye on it if you're interested in the idea, but don't encourage your boss to use it just yet :-)

It's made a lot of progress over the years, and works great for my needs, but we do still have serious bugs and performance problems we need to sort through; and yes still lacks a lot of critical tooling/infrastructure around it.

We love what we do, and think that we have something new to bring to the table (among other things, making it easy to pinpoint commits that you want to pull, delete, etc; DVCS'es may all do some cherry picking ala git add -p, but Darcs makes it possible to use it everywhere), but it may take us a very long time to get to stage where we can responsibly talk about it.

There lot's of work to do, lots. If you're looking into getting to some Haskell hacking, consider Darcs as a good side project to get into. We can use you.

[smichael]

I'm a Darcs user and occasional contributor. I have been using it continuously on small-medium projects to my great benefit since at least 2004. Now we have just released 2.8, the developer community has been growing, and sure Darcs has its problems but so does every VCS. We also have unique strengths. Is it really necessary to still be saying "we're not ready" and "don't use it yet" ?

I would like to see hard data and experience reports of where Darcs worked and didn't work for people, instead (so I'm loving this thread.) Here are a couple of repos I've worked with:

- hledger: 2477 patches, 251 files, 66M, 5 years of activity

- Zwiki 0.x: 1897 patches, 295 files, 12M, 5 years

- Darcs: 10171 patches, 731 files, 51M, 10 years

- GHC before it moved: 23413 patches, 1353 files, 162M, 5 years (+ 10 years of converted history)

Here's the darcsstat script that reports these numbers: https://gist.github.com/2653180