[__david__]

Man, sounds like the complete opposite experience to me. Going from SVN to even a centrally controlled Git repo is a breath of fresh air.

I recently switched a project from Darcs to git. It was (again) mostly centrally contained, despite being a DVCS. And Darcs being DVCS, we held out on switching to Git since it seemed like it wouldn't really be that much of an improvement. In other words, change for change sake.

Boy was I wrong. Even that change was refreshing. I find Git to be an absolute pleasure to use (and as a plus it stole all the good Darcs interface features). Git made managing our release branch fun again. The thing I like about Git is that it's low level enough that you can make it do anything.

Like the time I foolishly changed the EOLs on upstream code after I committed it—Git let me track my changes and merge in new upstreams, despite every line in the new upstream being different. Yay, git.

[the_af]

What are the improvements of using git over darcs? Do you miss anything from darcs?

[__david__]

Darcs doesn't support branches—it's just a collection of patches in every repo. Our Darcs project was set up with a "dev" repo where we'd dump everything and then promote patches to "beta" repo and then the "production" repo. The downside was that "dev" was filled with a lot of dead end patches that needed finishing/fleshing out before they could go to production. In git, those are now on separate branches and so the main development line is much cleaner. We could have done that with Darcs, but it would require multiple repos (one for each branch), both on the server and on our development machines (yuck).

The first thing we did after converting the Darcs repo to Git was to run a complicated rebase script that split all the dev repo patches into logical git branches. If you looked at the Git repo at that point it would be a single linear set of commits which then explodes into 14 or 15 different branches all at the same point.

Since then we've been using feature branches to do our development and Git really helps to keep distractions to a minimum. "git stash" and feature branches mean that random stuff I am trying is filed away neatly and doesn't pollute my working directory like it did when we were Darcs based.

Honestly I don't really miss anything from Darcs. I could fib and say Darcs's cherry-picking is better than Git's, but while that's true, I don't really cherry pick much in Git (it's usually only to fix accidental checkins on the wrong branch) and so I don't hit conflicts often (at all, really).

Darcs allowed us really simple deployment (we'd just push our patches to the live server—not the cleanest, but oh so easy). Git required us to write a hook that deploys when we push to the production branch. However, that was actually a blessing in disguise, since now the hook can do good stuff like reload the server when the code changes and rebuild static assets as appropriate. We used to just do that by hand.