Friday, 29 Jul 2005

Gotta hate those Red Giant bugs

In a recent thread on the darcs-user mailing list, this response from David Roundy (the original author of darcs) came along:

What you’ve run into is the infamous O(2^N) behavior of darcs when it encounters certain sorts of conflicts. The code should eventually complete, but it’s possible that our sun will become a red giant before that happens (which would most likely cause darcs to fail). :(

I have to admit that the red giant date is indeed a bit beyond my planning horizon. Of course, I can chuckle at this since I haven’t been burned by this bug, whatever it is :)

Darcs is a 2nd generation distributed version control tool. I’d been rather happy with it for a few months. It’s surprisingly easy to use, very powerful, has brilliantly straight forward cherry picking of patches, and seems to Just Work (tm) in all the use cases that I have for it. The way Darcs facilitates casual users to quickly create and submit patches is awesome.

AfC

Update: Spoke too soon; hit what appeared to be the Red Giant bug in Jan

1. Decided not to wait around to find out and stopped using Darcs for new work. Switched to evaluating 3rd generation tools. Tried Git for six months. Hated it — its user interface is worse that GPG’s if you can believe such a thing is even possible. Tried Bazaar aka bzr. Great usability, Just Works on incredibly complex corner cases. Awesome developer and user community. Using it for all projects as of Nov 2006.

red-giant-bugs, posted by Andrew Cowie in software/version-control at 2005-07-29T02:58:59Z

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